Health exec sacked

The director of finance for the North East Region, Ryan Anslip, has been relieved of his post, effective February 1, just a day after a Gleaner report revealed that close to $2 million had been allowed to sit idle in an account for two decades at the St Ann's Bay Hospital.

In a release yesterday, the Ministry of Health said Anslip's dismissal comes in the wake of the reports of dormant accounts relating to the St Ann's Bay Hospital as well as other performance-related matters.

An advertisement published in The Gleaner, which detailed the list of customers failing to claim their funds for a number of years from the Bank of Nova Scotia and Citibank, pointed to the hospital being among those with dormant accounts.

Audit required

Health Minister Rudyard Spencer had said he would be ordering that an audit be done throughout the health sector to determine whether similar accounts existed in other institutions.

"The boards of the regional health authorities must hold staff accountable for performance and the management of the regions must ensure that they are getting value for money from workers," Spencer said in yesterday's release.

Meanwhile, responding to concerns outlined by Opposition Health Spokesman Dr Fenton Ferguson, Spencer said it was far-fetched to suggest that the situation in the North East Region could be a sign that the system was failing.