Doctors filmed receiving bribes for drugs
Print Edition
THREE doctors in Shanghai have been suspended from duty and are under investigation following a drug kickback scandal exposed by CCTV over the weekend.
The report showed that doctors in six hospitals in Shanghai and Hunan Province took bribes from medicine sales representatives, who said the kickback amounted to about 30 to 45 percent of the medicines’ price.
The Shanghai Commission of Health and Family Planning said yesterday it had ordered hospitals exposed in the report to conduct checks and pledged anyone who had committed irregularities would be punished.
The commission said the medicines exposed in the program were no longer used and an investigation was under way. It ordered district health authorities and medical institutions in Shanghai to conduct self-checks and a rectification. A half-year inspection of the whole industry has also been launched.
China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission said yesterday it had sent inspection teams to Shanghai and Hunan in the wake of the incident.
A doctor in Hunan has been suspended from duty by authorities there, according to the national commission.
CCTV footage showed a doctor in Shanghai receiving a 1,800 yuan (US$260) bribe from a drug sales agent for prescribing 150 boxes of a medicine in a month. In another case, a drug representative gave envelopes to three doctors at a hospital within an hour.
A drug agent can get a bonus of around 10 percent from the medicine prescribed, the report said. The undercover investigation followed nearly 100 medicine representatives at four hospitals in Shanghai over eight months.
The TV report did not identify any of the hospitals by name.
The report started with a group of mysterious “special patients” at a Shanghai hospital that has more than 4 million outpatients a year. It said these “patients” had no medical records but showed up at similar times every day.
They only walked into consulting rooms when there were no actual patients inside. The bogus patients — the drug representatives — were seen checking doctors’ prescription tallies on their computers, CCTV footage showed.
A drug agent, who said he had lost his smartphone, was told by a doctor he would soon be able to buy an iPhone 6 from his illicit gains.
The drug representatives visited the hospitals on a daily basis in the hope that doctors would prescribe more of their products, the report said. It showed they gave “envelopes” to doctors after entering consulting rooms. One doctor received envelopes from four representatives within three minutes, the footage revealed.
“This medicine used to treat allergic rhinitis is priced at 129 yuan at Huashan Pharmacy, and the kickback (to a doctor) is 45 yuan,” a representative said.
Another representative said bribes amounted to 30 to 45 percent of the medicine’s price.
Insiders said the higher the price of the drug, the bigger room there is for a kickback, which encouraged some doctors to prescribe expensive drugs.
The footage showed a doctor in a hospital in Changsha, capital city of Hunan, showing displeasure that his kickback was not sufficient — the going rate is a minimum 20 percent of the drug’s cost.
“It should be at least 20 percent higher,” the doctor was filmed as saying. “Others offer more than 30 percent, and how could you compete with them? The price of the drug is so high, and you are such a big company, which is hard to understand,” he complained.
The report also compared the prices with the market rate of five drugs, with the biggest gap shown as being over 10 times.
The report carried out an investigation in Taihe County, Anhui Province, China’s biggest drug distributing center, where medicines are produced at more than 4,000 drug factories.
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