By deceiving patients and their attendants, most brokers engaged by private clinics and diagnostic centres in Rajshahi are making illegal profits.
It is alleged that many brokers allure patients and their attendants to private clinics and diagnostic centres often without any real need forcing unnecessary expenditures on diagnostics tests and unwanted hospitalization.
Such illegal practice are continuing without proper monitoring and many of the victims have to face such unfortunate fate and are believed to be kept hostage.
According to sources, there are 2,083 approved Private Clinics, Diagnostic centres and Blood Banks in eight districts of the Rajshahi division. Of those 777 are clinics, 1,290 diagnostic centres and 16 Blood Banks.
The number of such private clinics in Rajshahi district is 121, Diagnostic centres 226 and four Blood Banks. In addition, there are 55 illegal or unapproved clinics and diagnostic centres in the division.
The Luxmipur area of Rajshahi city is known as 'Clinic Para'. it is alleged that several powerful syndicates have emerged in the area. Such syndicates or circles involve doctors, owners of the diagnostics, so-called marketing officers, brokers and even the drivers of ambulances and even autorickshaw drivers.
Some agents known as ‘Runner Boys’; stay beside the chambers of the doctors. Whenever the patients approach the doctors, the runner boys convinced them to get treatment from some other doctors in some nearby diagnostic centres or clinics. It is alleged that these runner boys get roughly 50 per cent commission per patient from those diagnostic centres or clinics.
Golam Azam of the Rohanpur area of Chapainwabganj recently had gone to Luxmipur area to consult a doctor. The doctor did not give any tests for him. However, an agent named Rabiul Islam Robi took him to a nearby diagnostic centre where some of his tests including CBC, Bilirubin and SGPT were conducted without prescription.however, Rabiul was accompanied by a young man who identified himself as Dr Rakib Sadi, an assistant of the doctor.
Requesting anonymity, an owner of a diagnostic centre is informed whenever a doctor gives any test to a patient, he/she gets a commission from the diagnostic centre from where the tests were conducted.
Automatically the names of the doctors are entered through the software and their commissions are sent to their accounts every month. The Popular Diagnostic Centre at Luxmipur introduced such malpractice of commission for the first time in Bangladesh, he added.
The owner of the diagnostic centre further informed that the tests which would cost not more than Taka 2,000 instead are charged Taka 8,000 to 10,000 from the patients through various tricks. Even, some are only signboard-based diagnostic centres which never perform any tests of any samples but by dumping away those samples, they present the patients with some concocted, computer-printed reports only. He, however, did not disclose the names of those diagnostics fearing action from the local influential people.
Sources said vehicles from a local garage carry patients from various places of Jhenaidaha, Kushtia, Meherpur, Pabna and other surrounding districts to Rajshahi. Nearly 50 per cent of patients from those districts arrive in Rajshahi to get treatment in the district.
Almost all of those patients are subjected to the malpractices of the local clinics, hospitals and diagnostic centres.
Local people complain that entry of vehicles through one side of the road in front of Popular Diagnostic Centre has been closed for easy entry to the clinic resulting in huge trouble for passersby and patients and creating traffic gridlock.
Moreover, the fees for the diagnostic tests are unusually high.
Farid M. Shamim, Chief of Popular Diagnostic Centre in Rajshahi, however, denied the allegations and termed those completely false and intentional.
Dr Abu Sayed Mohammad Faruk, Civil Surgeon of Rajshahi said, action will be taken against any irregularities and malpractices of the private clinics, hospitals and diagnostic centres. He added that action against those was continuing and would continue every day.