Mr. George Brown, CEO of the Health Authority of Anguilla, has detailed a number of in-house activities in which it is engaged as part of its regular functions.
“Right now, we at the Health Authority are finalising our budget plans with the intention of identifying our rules and objectives for the next fiscal year, 2017,” Mr. Brown told The Anguillian in speaking about the organisation’s current activities. “In doing that, we generally work with the Minister of Health on what we call a Purchase Agreement which delineates what the Government wants us to do about health for the next fiscal year. Once we obtain that information, we then respond with our Annual Service Levels Agreements that we believe we can deliver. That formulates the budget, its organisation structure and all of the projects that are expected for the next fiscal year – so we are in the process of finalising those items.”
The CEO could not immediately say what the level of subvention was that the Health Authority received from the Government in 2016 and how much it would be in 2017. However, according to him, the allocation is based on the Annual Purchase Service Agreement with Government – and when it is known what the Health Authority is supposed to do, a cost is then associated with the plans involved. “We are in the process of finalising the budget so that agreement is not yet finalised for 2017,” he explained. (It is understood from the Ministry of Health that at one time the subvention was around 1.6 million dollars but was eventually reduced to some 1.3 million.)
Mr. Brown continued his conversation with The Anguillian as follows: “Additionally, we do what we call a ‘Performance Review’. It is how we have performed against what the Government has asked us to, compared with what we have actually done. We are having those review meetings coming up for the first and second of December. So my executive team and I will meet with the Ministry of Health, and we will go through all we were asked to do, what we have done, and all the gaps, and how we may remedy the situation going forward. So that is another forthcoming exercise.
“Another exercise is our staff meeting which is planned for the second week of December. We will also have a staff dinner which is scheduled for December 17 and we have re-established our award system. We have also re-established our award system on a quarterly basis for all persons who would have performed beyond the call of duty. We are planning a retreat but that will not happen this year. We have also planned an upcoming radio programme which commences today, Monday October 24 until Thursday, October 27, where we will be discussing improvements which will be made to our primary healthcare services.”
The above radio discussions and interviews have already been mentioned in another story by The Anguillian.
