Trip leads to freeze on checking accounts - Raleigh (NC) News & Observer

Michael Biesecker

RALEIGH - Spending has been frozen from special state checking accounts under scrutiny after a mental hospital nurse spent $5,000 for a trip to Africa.

Jim Osberg, director of the state system of mental hospitals, said Friday he had ordered the spending be suspended while the state reviews how the money is used. The accounts at issue are known as "preceptor funds" and contain money the hospitals earned from providing such services as housing students from foreign medical schools.

"We have frozen the preceptor accounts in order to review them to ensure that they support the missions of the facilities," Osberg said in a written statement.

The News & Observer reported last month that Gladwyn "Shryl" Uzzell, a nurse at Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro, used $5,000 in public money to pay for a 15-day trip to South Africa.

She visited medical facilities, an orphanage, botanical gardens, a former prison for political prisoners under apartheid and the houses of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. She also went on a safari at a wildlife preserve known for its lions, leopards, elephants and rhinos.

Uzzell said the trip, approved by the hospital's top administrators, provided insights that will apply directly to her state job training other nurses to care for the mentally ill back home in Eastern North Carolina -- especially the tour of an AIDS treatment ward in Cape Town.

Jack St. Clair, the director at Cherry, has argued the spending was not subject to rules governing how state money can be spent on travel expenses because the preceptor funds do not come from tax dollars.

michael.biesecker@newsobserver.com or (919) 829-4698