The Prime Minister has been asked to initiate a forensic audit into the operations of the South Western Regional Health Authority (SWRHA).
The call was made by Opposition Leader, Kamla Persad-Bisssessar.
Speaking in Parliament yesterday on a motion calling for Government to improve the delivery of healthcare services to the people of Trinidad and Tobago, Persad-Bissessar said she received several documents and board notes via mail and has verified their authenticity.
The Opposition Leader alleged the documents point to, “Major sanitisation and other equipment at the San Fernando General Hospital (SFGH), which are crucial for ensuring that the NICU functions optimally to save newborn babies’ lives are deliberately being left unmaintained or in an inactive state to allegedly facilitate the SWRHA giving out millions of taxpayers’ dollars in rental contracts to selected private companies to do the same job that this equipment does.”
She said she had also been reliably informed that the incinerator at the SFGH was down.
“We are reliably informed that the incinerator was functioning efficiently, but in August 2023, last year, it went down due to a lack of maintenance due to the unavailability of funding,” Persad-Bissessar claimed.
She alleged that instead of fixing it to the cost of $250,000, the hospital spent $1,553,625 in two months to outsource this service to private companies in 2023.
The Opposition Leader said according to her documents, those contracts were awarded to Piranha International Limited ($718,875) and Sanitec Limited ($834,750).
Persad-Bissessar further claimed that Guides Funeral Home was paid $40,000 to incinerate body parts.
The Opposition Leader went on to claim that the SFGH has so far spent $1.35 million on backup generators. She claimed that her documents showed that the SFGH is paying Standby Power $75,000 per week. She said the tendering process for new generators is October 2024 and the overall cost of renting those generators will increase to $2.6 million.
She said the oxygen plant at the SFGH is malfunctioning while one of the two boilers at the hospital has been down since 2018.