City watchdog: Health department ignored ways to stop theft and loss

• Reprints

Chicago’s Department of Public Health was accused Thursday of ignoring all but one of the inspector general’s eleven recommendations made two years ago to stop theft and loss of up to $1 million worth of pharmaceuticals used to supply city health clinics.

Inspector General Joe Ferguson acknowledged that there has been “significant turnover” in Health Department leadership.

But he said that’s no excuse for leaving the warehouse where drugs either disappeared or were unaccounted for open until Dec. 31, 2010, two years longer the city claimed.

Although city health clinics now order their supplies online, “with delivery made directly to the clinics,” they still don’t have the ability to track vaccines, drugs and clinical supplies, Ferguson said.

“Since the audit report was published, there has been a complete turnover of upper management. However, this does not excuse the city’s failure to have addressed the findings noted in the audit report issued two years ago,” Ferguson wrote.

“Lax oversight from the Administration is to blame rather than current department leadership.”

The Health Department responded by saying it is now in the process of developing a policy that “fully addresses the ordering, inventory management, distribution, recall and disposal of all medications.” Record-keeping will also be addressed, officials said.

“The inventory policies and procedures will address controls needed to safeguard the inventory from theft. …Policies will incorporate procedures for escorting guests, locking cages and refrigerators and monitoring surveillance cameras,” officials said.

The follow-up audit gives Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel more fodder to merge the city’s health clinics with Cook County. That’s something Emanuel and County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said this week they are considering.

In February, 2009, then-Inspector General David Hoffman disclosed that hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of controlled substances, vaccines and birth control pills had either expired or may have been “stolen or misplaced because of lax security and record-keeping by the city.

The Central Pharmacy warehouse, 1820 N. Besly Court, was created to save the city money through bulk purchases and time by maintaining a $3 million cache of drugs and medical supplies that could be quickly delivered to city health clinics.

Hoffman concluded that neither goal was accomplished. In fact, taxpayers-funded pharmaceuticals may have walked out the warehouse door.

Specifically, he found that:

• $529,000 worth of drugs purchased by the city expired before they could ever be dispensed to patients.

• At least $639,000 worth of vaccines purchased with federal grants were “not tracked in any meaningful way and “could have been stolen or misplaced without anyone knowing it.

• 438 packages of birth control pills at a cost of $19,000 were unaccounted for and “may have been stolen, lost or improperly distributed.”