QEH rolls out plan to save ‘millions’

The management of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) has started to save “millions of dollars” after reviewing some previous contracts, said the hospital’s financial director, Adrian Hurley.

A number of areas of the QEH’s finances have engaged his attention since he took up the relatively new post, he told parliament during the Appropriation Bill hearings.

He said: “We have found some contracts in place which we are reviewing.

“One in particular is the rental of printers at the sum of $14,000 a month.

“We are bringing that contract to an end this month which will be a saving of $176,000.”

Hurley also highlighted a major challenge at the morgue which sees the hospital paying out $35,000 a month to funeral homes to house corpses.

He told the House: “We also have an issue with our morgue.

“The capacity of our morgue is an issue and as a result of this we have uncovered a situation where we are currently outsourcing the storage of corpses at a private morgue at the tune of $35,000 a month.

“The management of our morgue needs attention. Short-stay corpses are staying longer at the hospital than they should — those persons who are not claimed.”

But the said plans are being put in place to address some of these costly commitments.

The financial director said: “Within my first two months on the job my first task was to analyse the operations of the QEH.

“We needed to look for cost savings and revenue generating opportunities to supplement our operations.

“We are in the process of implementing an inventory management system.

“The process of ordering and procuring medical supplies is erratic and currently a little disorganised. In some cases we are ordering too much of one thing and too little of another.

“This results in us having to make emergency orders which means flying them in and incurring additional costs.”

The director revealed that the first department to benefit from the new information systems would be A&E.

Hurley said: “We have rolled out the informations system this week. We are doing a pilot in A&E, then we will be moving to pharmacy, then we will be moving to the lab.

“We have a two-week pilot in A&E it is believed that when the full roll-out is done we are currently spending about $26 million dollars in drugs and medical supplies.

“The estimated savings is about 10 per cent of that which is about $2.7 million.”