Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Whittingham Hospital.

  • Great Britain. Committee of Inquiry into Whittingham Hospital.
Date:
[1972]
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Whittingham Hospital. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    accounts and arranging banking facilities for as many patients as possible. In this way nurses’ handling of cash will be reduced to a minimum though in the case of seriously incapacitated patients, they will still need to handle goods obtained on the patient’s behalf. We welcome this much needed advice, which anticipates any general recommendation on our part, but we would express the hope that nurses will be able to retain and develop their strictly therapeutic rdle of helping to assess patients’ capacity to handle money and to guide the spending of it. 103. A further weakness in the system of financial control found by the auditors was the apparently excessive levels of overtime of some ancillary staff. Details are set out in the Final Audit Report (Appendix VI). Especially notable are the workers on hospital farms, who were paid overtime for the six months up to 27 September, 1970, at an average rate of £19 per week and the 112 building and engineering workers who received more than £5 per week. This was defended to us in evidence as being necessary to retain the services of staff in competition with higher rates of pay elsewhere. We would associate ourselves with the auditors in recommending that overtime should be more strictly controlled for the future. We have already recommended, in the previous Chapter, the sale of the farms, which the hospital cannot hope to run with full economic efficiency. 104. Finally we would comment on the question of audit inspections. We have no reason to suppose that the special investigation of 1969-70 was carried out with anything less than exemplary thoroughness, but it seems to us extraordinary that routine audit inspections carried out each year previously did not extend to ward level, where they would have easily detected the complete collapse of financial control, and that the decline in the volume of shop takings compared with the amount of patients’ allowances was not seen to point to the need for more detailed examination of the hospital’s accounts. The auditors who gave evidence could not be certain from their records that their colleagues had not discussed these matters orally with the Treasurer’s Department but it is perfectly plain to us from the evidence that if defects on this scale had been discovered there would have been written communications in the strongest terms. We do not underestimate the complexity of the problem but we think that measures should be taken by the Department to ensure that routine audit inspections at psychiatric hospitals cover the aspects of financial control that have been found so grossly defective at Whittingham Hospital.
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