The administration of the National Health Service (CSS in Spanish) is one of the many state institutions of the current government that have sorely failed to complete unfinished public works inherited from the previous government.
At the time of the power hand over to the new administration in mid-2014, some 27 public work projects were still awaiting completion. The former director of the CSS, Guillermo Saez Llorens, wrote a detailed letter to his successor, Estivenson Giron, detailing the status of each project, and making recommendations to ensure all would see their completion, which was due between 2014 and 2015 at the latest.
Given Mr. Giron’s unresponsiveness, Mr. Saez Llorens wrote another letter dated 5th May 2016, this time to the acting president of the board of the CSS, Ramiro De Leon, lamenting the lack of completion of many works and highlighting the current administration's apparent inability to maintain those that were already operational.
Multiple projects have indeed been left to fall in complete disrepair: such is the fate of Panama City’s own Medical City; of the medical complexes in Boquete end Penonome; all the way down to the parking lots J.J. Vallarino, amongst others.
In his latest letter, Mr. Saez Llorens emphasized how he had "detailed both the status and all critical actions that needed to be taken on a project by project basis". Expressing concern for the current administration’s apparent lack of interest in completing ongoing works, as well as for its perverse focus on trying to apportion the blame for any failure to past administration officials, Mr. Saez Llorens reminded the president of the board that all projects concerned had received the CSS board’s initial, official approval. The CSS board also signed off on every yearly progress report that he presented to it: “these projects involved both large sums of money and many CSS officials”, he stated.
The former head of the CSS did not miss the opportunity to criticize, once again, the biased and unbalanced audit report presented to the board of the CSS on the matter of the SAP project, which was one of the cornerstones of the previous administration, aimed at improving the management of the CSS. “The current administration of the CSS had the audacity to claim that the SAP system was not working, when it was actually fully operative when we left the institution", he wrote. SAP is the world’s leading enterprise management software and was being used at the CSS for a range of processes, including procurement, payment processing, the elaboration of financial statements, general accounting tasks, and so on.
Mr. Saez Llorens went on to defend his record as director of the CSS, claiming that he left that institution in a much stronger and operative state that he had found it in. “As a citizen who benefits from social security, I will fight to make sure that all the progress made under my administration is not lost", he declared.
Another former CSS director, Juan Jovane, also added his voice to the chorus of concerns regarding the state of dereliction in which many CSS projects have been left. “I did not agree with the Medical City project in the first place" he argued " because I believe health care should be closer to the communities it serves. However, I am seriously concerned by the manner in which the current administration has simply walked away from the ongoing projects and failed to complete them without any fundamental legal basis to refuse to do so. This can cause many problems to the state, including expensive lawsuits for damages filed by the private companies that have been affected by these decisions", he explained.
For his part, the representative for the Committee for the Protection of Patients and their Family Members, Roger Bares, reinforced the same message: "if the projects were being executed according to the agreed contractual guidelines, then there is no basis to desist from their completion", he said, while exhorting the board of the CSS to break its silence and take action on these urgent matters.
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