The ANGAU Memorial Provincial Hospital used to have a budget appropriation of K30-K35 million.
This year they received over K40 million while chief executive officer of the Morobe Provincial Health Authority, Dr Kipas Binga, said once completed, the redeveloped ANGAU would require an estimated amount of K50 million to run it.
“The operational budget consists of personal emoluments (PE), goods and services, fuel, and other normal operations,” said Dr Binga.
“When people talk about operational funding, they talk about two components; one is the PE component which we don’t have total control over, they normally deduct it from the top and it comes through our salaries through the established government systems.
“The one that we have total visibility and control over spending is the goods and services component. It comes to us and we make a decision on how best we can spend it based on rentals and other running operational costs of the hospital.”
Dr Binga outlined that the value of personal emoluments for 2022 was K96 million, while ANGAU was appropriated K45 million.
“So if you look at it, the appropriation does not match the actuals.
“Knowing that, we put a budget submission last year of about K115 million, also considering some of our vacancies.
“When we were appropriated, like everybody else, we were given this year about K48 million. So you can already see that even this year’s appropriation alone, cannot cater for the current staff-on strength because staff-on strength, we are close to K100 million already.
“Let alone, getting additional vacancies of 800.
“The Department of Personnel Management (DPM) has advised us to ask Treasury to give the DPM a guarantee – by way of writing – to inform that they are ok for us to advertise. So through the normal budgetary process, we can try and find some money to fund those vacant positions that we have.
“We cannot advertise the whole 800 for two reasons; one, we probably might not get everybody to come in because we don’t have the workforce and two, if we get all of them in, it would take almost a year or more than that to go through the recruitment process.”
Dr Binga described Morobe PHA as the biggest PHA in the country with 1,887 positions under the establishment. Of that number, 852 positions are vacant.
He estimated that ANGAU’s catchment population is between 4.5 to 5 million people, adding, that is about one-third of PNG’s population.
Just like health facilities around the country, ANGAU is still facing staff and drug shortages.
Dr Binga said he is under a lot of pressure, especially in terms of resourcing.