Workers at Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University Teaching Hospital Amaku, Awka are jittery and apprehensive as Governor Charles Chukwuma Soludo installs Time and Attendance Machines to check lateness to duty, truancy, unnecessary absenteeism and ghost workers respectively.
The Commissioner for Health, Dr. Ben Afam Obidike who disclosed the strategic plan to ensure efficient service delivery at the hospitals as the governor directed, said the time and attendance machines would be installed in all the General Hospitals in Anambra state to enable the government to track and trail workers’ response to duty calls.
Obidike who spoke exclusively with our correspondent, said the government has started installing the regulatory machines at Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University Teaching Hospital Amaku Awka but according to him, workers at the hospital seemed not comfortable with the new technology.
The Commissioner maintained that from investigations, workers expressed reservations at the innovation and tried to find out if the time and attendance machines could be bypassed so as to maintain the status quo.
He said the government found out most workers seldom come to work and when they do, they either came late and leave before the close of work or report for duty only to disappear from the workplace and return at closing hours to sign out. While some do not come to work at all but received salaries at the end of the month.
The Commissioner stated that the government would also carry out Biometric Capturing of workers in all the General Hospitals to enable the government to monitor their movements after clocking in at the workplace each day, adding that the new innovations would checkmate redundancy and complacency while increasing productivity.
Meanwhile, the contractor handling the installation of the time and attendance regulatory machines at Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University Teaching Hospital Amaku Awka, Mr. Chidi Okafor, who is the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer TramSecure Resources Nigeria, revealed that about 20% of workers at Amaku Teaching Hospital do not come to work at all and at the end of the month they receive their salaries.
Okafor noted that it was as a result of it that the Anambra State Government decided to install the devices to ascertain if the workers actually come to work and to also sieve ghost workers off the system.
The contractor said workers at COOTH Amaku Awka were apprehensive when the regulatory devices were being installed on Tuesday 13th June, saying that about 95% of the workers were not comfortable with the devices as it was no longer business as usual.