No more as sacred profession….
By Shahid Rizvi
The insatiable desire for money has resulted in deep-rooted corruption in Pakistani society. Unabashed and shameless extortion and amassing of wealth have become the order of the day.
The medical profession is a spiritual and human life-saving occupation and everyone involved in it has to keep the sagacity of ethics. But the mire swallowed every value.
All the big organizations, autonomous semi-government, and government bodies spent billions of rupees on the health care and treatment of their employees and their families. Every organization sets up a whole network of panel doctors, panel medical stores, hospitals, diagnostic centers, and specialists.
A symbolic and token example of the corruption prevalent in this field operation of medical stores business. In fact, these penal stores are the center of malpractice.
Everything depends upon the medicines which have to be taken from the stores. If these stores are somehow made invalid of corruption, the whole edifice will be razed to the ground.
A panel doctor’s prescription is presented at the counter of the store. The salesman on the counter evaluates the medicine and then makes out a slip for a sum of 30% less than that total amount. The patient either takes the money instantly or sometimes later. In case the patient insists for the medicines, he is informed that these are not available. Such patients if they persist in their demand, are provided with inferior quality much cheaper medicines which are abundantly available in the market. Another trick is to assess much less amount than the original price in the ‘parchi’ thus making another opening to huge profits.
Keeping in view thousands of panel medicine stores of each of the big organizations, it is no small amount involved. Each of the panel stores represents many organizations at a time. If 100 hundred prescriptions are presented at the counter, the daily extra unconscionable profit sums up to no less than a thousand rupees. Millions and millions of rupees of public funds are thus fraudulently drained out to the end receiver stores.
This ‘Parchi’ system shows us what is actually in the store. A minimum part of this extorted amount is distributed from a peon to the high bosses of the medical departments. The very fact that the shares reach high in officialdom, shows how much amount have been exacted.
The corruption has actually stepped down every inch of the floor. The patients have become habituated to it. As a practice most of the patients now sell their prescriptions and take money otherwise they get inferior quality medicines. Those who are in a good book of doctors get a big chunk, while the common employees get common medicines.
There are cases where investigation were made by organisations and many employees had been terminated on the charge of this fraud. A list of beneficiaries of malpractice in medicines will include medical departments doctors, and hospitals. The prescriptions in the name of thousands of such employees who never appear before the doctors are also used for ulterior designs. Some hospitals made fake bills and got the money.
The system adopted by PIA sometime back could be a safeguard against such practices, but that too not completely. The medicines were provided by the airline’s own stores and the medicine was stamped on the bottle and wrapper ‘Not for sale.’
PIA has its own hospital which catered to their needs satisfactorily. Their employees were very rarely allowed to be admitted to other hospitals. This reduced the chance of illegal transactions to approximately zero. Other organizations do not adopt this system because of the staunch opposition of their own bureaucrats. They think that the PIA system is cumbersome and impracticable. However, we are surviving under the same system which is cumbersome and impracticable since ages.
