The surfacing of the information that young doctors at the New Amsterdam Hospital are conducting private practice and collecting fees is most disturbing and disgusting because this is a blatant form of exploitation of people and a highly immoral practice as well.
It is so ironic that doctors are the people who are trained to save lives and help people overcome their illnesses would seek to rapaciously exploit them. This is in total contradiction to the Hippocratic Oath which they all subscribe to.
This is indeed a serious and sad situation because it is playing with people’s lives and their health which is so important to the overall well being of nation.
But Minister within the Ministry of Health, Dr. Bheri Ramsaran said the people who pay these doctors are actually encouraging the practice. Instead people should be firm and stand up for their rights and refuse to pay these corrupt doctors.
The minister also correctly noted that these doctors were trained by taxpayers’ dollars and therefore they have a moral obligation to serve the people of this country.
However, it was wise of the minister to go on the ground and get a first hand assessment of the situation and engage regional officials in exchanges with the intention of addressing the problem.
It would be hoped that similar visits to other administrative regions will be made because this practice by doctors and medical personnel is prevalent at other public medical institutions.
The issue should be addressed also as a microcosm of a larger societal problem of the “get rich quick” syndrome and the greed which is manifested in the pursuit of materialism. This negative and unfortunate tendency seems to have infiltrated every stratum of society and every profession.
It is eating away at the sinews of the moral fibre of society like a cancer with little progress being made to cub it.
Corruption in the public health care system is a worldwide phenomenon affecting both the rich and developed as well as the poor and underdeveloped countries.
The medical journal Lancet is very instructive in this regard: “In recent years, newspaper business pages have been full of examples of corruption and criminal business practices that led to the enrichment of a few greedy individuals.”
“Yet, one enormous business affecting everyone’s life, the health-care sector, which is worth an estimated US$3 trillion per year worldwide and which is mostly funded by taxpayers’ money, is strangely exempt from close scrutiny. Very little is known about the extent to which corruption affects health-care systems and providers. The word corruption—abuse of entrusted power for private gain—rarely enters health professionals’ vocabulary and is frequently softened to unethical or unprofessional behaviour.”

“In its annual Global Corruption Report 2006, released on Feb 1, the non-governmental organisation Transparency International shines a spotlight on the health-care sector and concludes that corruption permeates the provision of health care at all levels and in all countries. The health sector is particularly prone to corruption, argues the report, as it constitutes a maze of complex and opaque systems that provide a fertile ground for malfeasance. Transparency International’s focus on health is a welcome wake-up call for both developed countries, which are grappling with spiralling health-care costs and increasingly impossible budget control, and for developing countries, which are ravaged by preventable and treatable diseases. Corruption, argue the report’s authors, is one of the main reasons why the global community is off target to achieve the health-related Millennium Development Goals.”

“What is the scale of the problem? In terms of financial costs, it is impossible to state an exact figure, but the estimate goes into tens of billions of dollars per year. The spectrum of corruption ranges from physicians with conflicts of interest advocating a particular treatment for the wrong reasons to aggressive marketing strategies by pharmaceutical companies; from underpaid health workers accepting small bribes from patients to the provision of ineffective counterfeit drugs; from large-scale embezzlement of public-health funds to massive distortions of health policy and funding by corrupt government officials.”