NKF saga - more questions than answers

Categories: Singapore

The new NKF clarified how every donated dollar was spent by the old management on Dec 29. This comes about after the damning KPMG report which said that only 10 cents goes to the patient. Since then, there were numerous queries about what happened to the other 90 cents.

The new management explained it as follows

(Table lifted from Today newspaper Dec 30, 2005)

Looking at expenditure in 2006, it is reassuring to know that patient subsidies increased from 10 cents to 38 cents and the hefty fund-raising expenses decreased from 22 cents to 9 cents. But what happened to expenditure for health screening/prevention and especially overheads? Both have been increased - 3 cents for screening/prevention but a hefty 10 cents for overheads!

My question is this - when Mr Gerard Ee said that NKF will go back to basics, I will assume this means providing dialysis for renal patients as envisaged by Prof Khoo, founder of NKF. Granted that health screening and prevention are both part and parcel of the general management of kidney disease, why would this have increased when if this was not part of the basics? If the old NKF could manage to carry out fairly successful health screening/prevention at a lower cost, then shouldn't the new NKF management learn from them and improve further if possible?

The other more alarming expenditure is overheads. I assume this includes staff pay. I have no grouse as to how much the CEO gets paid as long as there is no abuse. If he is worth $25k, so be it. However after the KPMG reported the excesses and wastage of monies by the old management, we know that overhead can be further minimised. In 2003, the overhead portion is 14 cents. After the NKF had been cleansed and tidied, the overheads increased to 24 cents out of every dollar! Come on, how do you justified the increase in overhead expenditure with the new (prudent, and lean) NKF management, when even with previous ridiculous excesses in expenditure, the overhead for the old NKF was less. And we were told for a fact that now there were fewer staff compared to that in 2003.

If indeed 41 cents went to the reserves in previous NKF, despite the excesses reported in KPMG, then I think previous CEO did not do too badly. Maybe his focused was shifted from patient-centric to reserve-centric. Even after being 'renumerated' with such high bonuses, he even manage to keep overheads down. Maybe he did deserve his $25k pay after all!

I hope the new NKF will review the figures so that the main portion of the charity dollar goes to the patients. After all, the reason why NKF was started was to help renal patients pay for their dialysis treatment. Any other expenditure should be secondary to this priority.