LBJ Medical Center’s former chief executive officer Joseph Davis-Fleming says the hospital board has increased their stipend payments and in addition is paying themselves to “manage” the government owned medical center.

He is also seriously considering taking legal action against the hospital board, who he says blamed him for the many years of problems at LBJ, cited by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare (CMS) survey report.

Davis-Fleming, who was hired last year on a three-year contract, resigned the first week of July this year and left the territory last Friday heading to Texas for orientation on his new job as a mentor and trainer for a 500-bed teaching hospital in Rwanda as well as a senior advisor to Rwanda's Minister of Health.

In an email from Honolulu early this week responding to certain issues at the hospital, Davis-Fleming claimed that the hospital board — unbeknownst to the governor and the Fono — increased their stipend payments to $200 per meeting in excess of 2 meetings per month, thus giving themselves a financial motive for meeting more frequently, as they have been over the past couple of months.

Local law states that the board “shall meet at least once per quarter” and board members are to be compensated at the rate of $5,000 per year, except the chairperson, who shall be paid $6,000 per year.

Besides the increase in stipends, Davis-Fleming also alleges that board members are compensating themselves to "manage" the hospital in the absence of a CEO and this is “a direct violation of the federal regulations, one of many that CMS cited in their most recent survey.” (See yesterday’s Samoa News on the CMS report dealing with the Governing Body for LBJ)

According to the former CEO, these additional compensations by the board are not budgeted and this money should be going to patient care. Additionally, LBJ management is still handing all the work.

Davis-Fleming also said that the hospital board chairman (Mase Akapo) lied to the Fono about his comments regarding the CMS report “and my lack of action” to address the CMS report “as well as not knowing who released my performance evaluation” to the media.

(During a Senate hearing late last month, Mase told senators that, “Not one of the board members released this to the media” and suggested that Davis-Fleming gave the evaluation to the media.)

Davis-Fleming claimed it was board member Rep. Faimealelei Anthony Allen who released the evaluation. He also accused Faimealelei of “stirring up trouble” and said that the lawmaker sitting on the board “is a conflict of interest” — which has been “ignored.”

“Thanks to [Faimealelei] and the hospital board's unnecessary and unprecedented efforts to damage my reputation and blame me for many years of the hospital's problems caused by the very corrupt people who the board protected and kept in place despite my strong objections, I am now seriously considering taking legal action at both the local and federal level,” he said.

Davis-Fleming claims that the current board should be “dissolved for supporting Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and U.S. Department of Labor violations, as well as blatant violations of federal CMS regulations putting LBJ at risk of losing millions of dollars.”

He claimed that the board is “unfit to govern the hospital as indicated by the CMS survey report” and asked what did the board do to fix the many problems cited in the July 2010 CMS survey report after they were appointed to the hospital board, “five months before I arrived, and never made me aware of this critical problem when they hired me, giving me other priorities instead.”

“Additionally, the management at the time never made me aware either, so they are equally at fault for withholding this info from me,” said Davis-Fleming, whose assignment in Rwanda is part of a program for Yale University-School of Medicine.

REP. FAIMEALELEI’S REPLY

Mase didn’t immediately response to Samoa News request for comments and reaction to Davis-Flemings’ allegations.

However, Faimealelei when reached by phone for comment on the allegation he released to the media the performance report, said, “I did no such thing.”

He explained that it was himself and the attorney general who met with Davis-Fleming and during that meeting the envelope containing the letter from the board was opened in front of Davis-Fleming and read to him.

“If anybody leaked the letter to the media it was probably Davis-Fleming himself,” Faimealelei said, adding that the former CEO understood and agreed to all the terms cited in the letter.

He also said that it’s “very sad” that a person waits until being off island before negative comments comes out the next day in the media and in this case Davis-Fleming’s allegations made against the hospital board.

“When Mr. Davis-Fleming was hired, the first thing the board told him from the beginning to do was to address issues raised in the CMS report. And several months later nothing was done,” he said, and stressed that the current board only took over last year while all the problems cited in the CMS report stem from the 2010 report.