Supervisors in nine hospitals replaced due to poor financial results

Ljubljana – The government has replaced members of the supervisory boards of nine hospitals due to the institutions’ poor financial performance and will carry out a special audit to see how they continue to post losses despite receiving hundreds of millions of euros in extra funding last year.

The aim is to stabilise their finances and make sure they emerge from the red by the end of the year, Health Minister Danijel Bešič Loredan told the press after Thursday’s cabinet session.

The audit will be conducted by Aleš Šabeder, a former health minister and director of UKC Ljubljana who is now in charge of the ministry’s office for purchasing the quality.

Šabeder said that 21 public hospitals had a cumulative surplus of revenue over expenditure of EUR 5.5 million last year, having received an additional EUR 300 million in budget funding for extra services and Covid bonuses.

But this year, the situation is “alarming,” Šabeder said, with the cumulative loss standing at EUR 41 million in the first five months of the year and 15 hospitals in the red.

UKC Ljubljana, by far Slovenia’s largest hospital, currently has the biggest loss, EUR 24 million, with four more having losses in excess of a million euro.

They also have EUR 173 million in liabilities on their books, of which EUR 77 million are already over due, and their costs of materials and services have been skyrocketing.

“We have a lot of questions and not all have been answered,” according to Šabeder.

The first job of the newly appointed supervisory boards will be to be briefed on the current state of play, whereby they will prepare measures to stabilise hospital finances.

The post Supervisors in nine hospitals replaced due to poor financial results appeared first on Slovenia Times.