AMMAN -- The University of Jordan Hospital (UJH) has closed two units because it lacks the financial resources to maintain them, UJH President Mujalli Mhailan said on Thursday.
He said the UJH had no other choice but to close its extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy and digestive tract endoscopy units "due to having no money to purchase new machines to equip the two units".
Mhailan explained that the hospital's dispute with the Ministry of Health over the ministry's debts to the hospital has yet to be solved and "we have to pay JD20 million to medical [drug and device] companies to be able to buy medicine and replace the old machines".
The ministry's outstanding debt to the hospital from 2011 stands at JD23 million, of which JD1.9 million is to be paid from public expenditures and the remainder from the National Health Insurance Fund, according to Mhailan.
He said that after several meetings with the ministry, no agreement has been reached on a mechanism to pay the bills.
The hospital president said last week that the ministry had agreed to pay the JD1.9 million from public expenditures but refused to pay the rest without conducting a random audit of the bills.
Mhailan said at the time that a random audit would be against the Audit Bureau's policies and argued that if the ministry wanted to scrutinise the bills before paying them, it should conduct a comprehensive audit, which in turn, the ministry said would be unaffordable.
Minister of Health Abdul Latif Wreikat told The Jordan Times on Thursday that the ministry has made several unsuccessful attempts to reach an agreement with the UJH management.
"We proposed that the UJH management give us 25 per cent discount on the total bills before auditing and we would pay them JD16 million, but they rejected this proposal," the minister said.
However, a source informed with the issue said the health ministry is refusing to pay the bills before auditing them because it "has yet to receive its budget allocations from the finance ministry".
Every year, the ministry pays an average of JD256 million to private, university and military hospitals for patient referrals.
"If patients cannot be treated in one of the ministry's hospitals, or if beds are unavailable, they are referred to another facility affiliated with our partners," Wreikat said in a previous statement.
However, to eliminate this financial burden, a plan is under way to develop the ministry's facilities and provide them with doctors in underserved specialisations, the minister noted.
© Jordan Times 2012
