Auditor general pans wait times, Tri-County School Board

A new report from Nova Scotia Auditor General Michael Pickup probes management in health care, education and community services, and is calling for better leadership to improve how services are delivered.

The report, released Wednesday morning, criticizes management oversight at the Tri-County Regional School Board in southern Nova Scotia​, where students are performing poorly.

The report also says the Department of Community Services doesn’t have proper safeguards to stop unauthorized people from accessing its Integrated Case Management system.

Auditors themselves managed to gain unauthorized access to four servers used by the database, which holds highly sensitive information about clients.

And the auditor general is also calling for better operating room wait time management, with Nova Scotia falling behind national averages for certain surgeries, such as knee replacements.

The report says the government has done a poor job of implementing previous recommendations from the auditor’s office. Failing to do so “increases the risk that services are not effectively delivered in the most efficient and economical manner possible.”

“Departments need to do a better job of implementing our recommendations and elected officials, such as the Public Accounts Committee, need to continue to hold departments accountable for results,” the report says.

Key findings

Tri-County Regional School Board:

• The governing board doesn’t ask for information on student performance, nor teacher and principal development and evaluation. The board doesn't appropriately evaluate the superintendent’s performance, nor does it have a process to gauge its own progress as a board.
• School board management is not monitoring student performance in many subject areas.

Community Services:

• "Significant weaknesses" in the IT security of the Integrated Case Management system, which holds information on clients, children taken into care and client financial details.
• Security weaknesses meant auditors were able to gain unauthorized access to information in the database.
• Audit identified deficiencies in monitoring resources and planning to restore the system following an outage

Surgery wait times:

• There is no overall action plan to deal with lengthy waits
• Operating rooms aren’t being optimally used, which means opportunities to do more surgeries are lost.

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