Doctors duty more personified, no more perks allowed

Very recently, there has been news that the Medical Council of India has prepared standard operating guidelines for Doctors with the motive of curbing Doctors from taking freebies from pharma firms .

MCI declared that Doctors accepting freebies such as gifts and foreign jaunts from pharmaceutical companies will now be punished based on the value of gifts received. The punishment will range from a censure for gifts of up to Rs 5,000 to deletion of the errant doctor’s name from the state or national medical register for a period of one year or more.

The Medical Council of India (MCI) is also soon set to notify the new ethical guidelines under the Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) (Amendment) Regulations, 2015. While the Indian Medical Council Regulations, 2009 bar doctors from receiving freebies, the punishment, if caught, is now subject to the discretion of either the central or the state councils’ ethics committee. A voluntary code of conduct for pharmaceutical companies came into effect from January 2015. It was to be reviewed a few months later to decide whether it should instead be made mandatory. The review is still pending.

An alleged connection between some pharmaceutical companies and unscrupulous doctors is widely predictable as one of the key reasons behind rising drug prices, although companies maintain that the margins are to account for research and development work. In reality, costs of the freebies to doctors are usually worked into the marketing cost of drugs. As a result, drugs priced higher containing the same molecules often tend to be the market leaders.
Some time back, the MCI ethics committee had summoned 326 doctors from Maharashtra for accepting gifts, including jewellery and flats, apart from the more usual gift of foreign jaunts.

As per the new ethics guidelines any doctor accepting gifts, travel facilities, hospitality, cash or monetary grants worth Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 from a pharma company would see his/her name removed from the national or state medical register for three months. Nobody can practice medicine without registration with either the state medical council or the central council. If the value of the freebies is between Rs 10,000 and Rs 50,000 the penalty would go up to six months, and for those priced Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh, the errant doctor’s name would remain struck off the register for a year.

The new guidelines lay down that medical practitioners may carry out research work funded by pharma companies, provided they ensure that the research proposals have all the necessary clearances, it fulfils the legal requirements, the funding is publicly disclosed, and proper care and facilities are provided to volunteers. Any contravention for the first time will merit a censure but repeat for offenders names would be struck off the medical registers for a period depending on the gravity of the violation.

Apart from the problem of accepting gifts, freebies and demanding for bigger incentives like house, clinics, cars, furnitures, abroad vacations, another problem that is nowadays faced with private practitioners are that most of them are connected with pathological laboratories and smallest of problems are elaborately sentenced for diagnosis, pathological examination, various blood/urine profile examination incurring high cost of treatment to the patient’s family. The monetary beneficial connection between the medical wings gives them the freedom of looting poor ignorant patients.