N15MILLION FRAUD ROCKS NNAMDI AZIKIWE UNIVERSITY TEACHING HOSPITAL, TEN STAFF NABBED

The suspects were said to have broken into the institution’s Automated Billing and account method for the health station which was installed to ensure pilfering and stealing of money generated by the teaching hospital.

Penpushing further reports that,  Prof Igwegbe said that the Automated Billing Method was introduced into the institution in 2012 and that the idea behind the introduction was to minimize fraud, enhanced the services of the hospital by reducing wasting time of patients, noting that the system is being powered by “Health Station” on Public Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement.

The Chief Medical Director however clarified that “Health Station” as an organization does not collect revenue for the medical institution but made an application available to the hospital which permanently solved the problems associated with fake receipts.

“There was a time in the history of this hospital, all manner of receipts were flying around here, some of the receipts in use in those days even looked more original than the hospital’s original receipts and in the process huge sums of money was lost to the fraudsters’.

“The automated billing method has been working effectively for the hospital until this year when our partner employed some bad eggs who connived with our staff to defraud the system. The fraud was discovered three weeks ago. After the incident, the company carried out a system auditing and discovered that it was their staff who manipulated the system’.

“The management of NAUTH has zero tolerance to fraud and hence the use for the automated billing station and we have already established a committee to investigate the level of involvement of our staff and at the end of the day, the ones found culpable would be dealt with in line with the existing civil service laws’.

Penpushing also reports that, the Hospital Head, while speaking on issue of Facebook account, he declared that he does not own or operate Facebook account and warned members of the public to disregard any name associated to him in the Facebook adding that anyone who does it, does it at his or her peril

“Most of CMDs across the country are victims of fraudsters using their pictures and other details to create Facebook accounts to defraud the unsuspecting members of the public. The management and administration of the hospital cannot be done on Facebook and other social media, that is why the doors of this office is always open so that whoever that has any complaint’

The Chief Medical Director who used the occasion of the briefing to highlight the recent achievements recorded by the hospital said “NAUTH is alive, we are rendering quality services to our patients who are satisfied and happy with us. This has led to a huge number of patients trooping to this hospital for medicare’.

“We have functional SERVICON, we place suggestion boxes here and there, so that we get feedback from our patients. Our endoscopic surgery department has improved. We have acquired machine for blood culture. We bought two new 500KVA generators to enhance power situation in this hospital’.

“NAUTH is only struggling to buy gas for the generators now unlike in the past that we were struggling with repair works on the old generators. The CEO of Air Peace, Barr Onyema also donated one 500KVA generator to this hospital. In all, we can say categorically that we are carrying out our mandate to the patients in this hospital’.

Penpushing reports that, Prof Igwegbe however identified lack of space in the hospital’s temporary site as a major challenge  but added quickly that work is ongoing at the permanent site and that the management and board of the hospital is passionately committed to seeing the hospital move to the permanent site.