ArmInfo. The Audit Chamber (AC) of Armenia revealed 5 major inconsistencies with the provisions of licenses issued to medical institutions of the republic. This was announced on May 22 at a joint meeting of the standing parliamentary commissions on financial-credit and budgetary issues and on health and social issues, said AP member David Chibukhchyan.
He reminded that the licenses are issued by the Agency under the licenses of the Ministry of Healthcare of the Republic of Armenia on a perpetual basis with the payment of the appropriate size of the state duty. However, studies conducted by the Chamber of Auditors for the period from January 1, 2017 to September 30, 2018, revealed some inconsistencies. In particular, one of the problems concerns the service life of medical equipment, which must meet modern requirements in order to eliminate its moral and physical deterioration. The licensing authority, continued David Chibukhchyan, should assess the applicant's availability of equipment, in accordance with the decision
Government of 2002, which has a list of equipment required for each area. The Chamber of Auditors, however, noted that the service life of the equipment has not been established, therefore there is a risk that applicants may provide outdated equipment. Therefore, the Chamber proposes to develop and implement legal mechanisms with an indication of the timing of the use of medical equipment.
The second problem, discovered during the inspections, concerned the issue of the provision of documents testifying to the qualifications of specialists who will work in the organization that received the license. According to the current order, an organization only after receiving a license, 5 days before the start of operations, must submit the relevant documents on the qualifications of its employees. The Chamber considered this approach ineffective.
Moreover, having examined 400 licenses issued during the reporting period, the Chamber found 267 cases in which the above-mentioned documents were completely absent. This means that either the licensed organization did not start working, or that it began working, but did not provide documents on the qualifications of its employees. In the latter case, the license must be suspended. AC researchers found out that some organizations in Armenia started their activities without providing the above-mentioned documents, moreover, some of them even received funds within the framework of the state order.
The third problem discovered during the audit concerned the issue of qualification of specialists. According to the accepted procedure, in medical institutions that have licenses, commissions should be formed to deal with this issue, but this is not done, and the process of checking organizations before granting a license involves only checking documents, not the specialists themselves.
The fourth problem concerns the activity of licensing commissions. In the course of examining applications for licenses, it often turns out that the applicant organization does not have important equipment for carrying out its activities, for example, the sterilization room does not have the sterilization apparatus itself, or there is no protective equipment for the employees in the X-ray room. According to the rules, such organizations should not receive a license. But in fact, some of them get a license. The Chamber identified 67 cases in which the Licensing Agency decided that the claimant's conditions did not meet the requirements, but the commission issued a license in the course of a secret ballot.
The fifth issue concerns random inspections of applicant organizations. As David Chibukhchyan noted, 80% of the applicants, according to the procedure, are checked, and 20% are not. At the same time, it is unclear what principle is chosen, who will be checked, and who will not. One way or another, the Chamber considered this approach to be fundamentally wrong, since we are talking about people's health, all organizations that are going to work in the health sector should be checked without fail.