Rourkela: A Health and Family Welfare (H&FW) department audit team will be visiting the Rourkela Government Hospital (RGH) to conduct a probe into the alleged corruption plaguing the healthcare facility. It is learnt that a special audit will be conducted after the report of the National Health Mission (NHM) fact-finding team last month hinted at corruption. The special audit team will visit RGH September 9. “This (audit) will blow the lid off corruption,” said a doctor at RGH on condition of anonymity. RGH remained a happy hunting ground for the corrupt for a long time. Services like laundry, food, security and mortuary smacked of corruption. These unfair practices were going on for some time when RGH was being headed by different persons.
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Besides, the NHM-appointed hospital manager and now dismissed Mohit Srivastav as the mastermind of most of the corrupt practices. Incumbent RGH director Ganesh Das got a whiff of the malpractices when one agency named M/s Medicaid Ancillary Services returned Rs 20 lakh it had received for providing ‘excellent services’. There was no mention in the agreement between the vendor and RGH that the agency would be given a kind of bonus if it provided ‘excellent services’.
During an initial probe by the incumbent director, it was found that this was possible because the hospital manager circumvented the rules so that his interests were best served. It was also found that the manager had clandestinely sold three deep freezers of the mortuary to a private party in Mumbai. This came to the fore when the new freezers arrived at the mortuary. Even the director had filed a police complaint. The NHM team, during its visit, however, failed to quantify the exact amount of misappropriation of funds at the RGH. Therefore, it had to make a special request to send a special audit team from the H&FW department to dig out the facts.
RAJESH MOHANTY, OP