THE PNG Nursing Association (PNGNA) President Frederick Kebai has expressed a direct plea towards NCD Provincial Health Authority to address why they have yet to appoint a permanent Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Health workers across the country are complaining that since Provincial Health Authorities were established, there has been an issue of appointing acting CEOs and NCD PHA has continued to fail in this aspect, Kebai stated.
Kebai said that there are many unresolved and ongoing issues for nurses, such as payroll discrepancies and inconsistency in resource allocation and service delivery within NCD hospitals, all of which are put into petitions and sent to NCD PHA.
However, there is no consistent effort put towards addressing them because they only have acting CEOs without the adequate time to follow through.
“PNGNA is calling on the DPM, Department of Health and the NCD PHA Board to come to a decision in putting a permanent CEO in place to address outstanding issues within this month, failure to do so and properly setting up their office will continue to create a lot of problems. If the workers are not satisfied due to inaction, we will have to take some drastic actions to ensure the authorities do the right thing.”
With the delay in appointment, there has been an evident lack of proper management within NCD PHA administration, PNGNA General Secretary Mr. Gibson Siune added.
He said that for many health workers and especially nurses, they are blamed for poor health service delivery, when in fact this is a direct result of mismanagement, corrupt practice and lack of good governance and leadership within NCD PHA.
“Nurses have raised various issues surrounding management and how nursing standard practice has lost its value, which PNGNA has brought before NCD PHA executives, unfortunately they are yet to be addressed,” Siune reiterated.
There were five candidates that were put through the recruitment process, which PNGNA is aware of, however the appointment of a permanent CEO has been delayed without much reason given, Siune said.
PNGNA is now calling on the NCD PHA Board to immediately appoint a CEO and establish a team to bring stability to its office and effectively address the outstanding issues of its health workers.