New Delhi: Every year, on a specific day, some hospitals affiliated with medical colleges admit healthy individuals as patients. This trick is employed to deceive inspection teams that come to assess the facilities for granting approval to establish a new medical college or to increase the number of MBBS seats in an existing one. In many cases, the hospitals succeed in their deception.
Recently, there have been multiple recorded instances of medical colleges hiring fake or non-serious patients to meet the minimum standards required for grant of a license to operate or to increase the number of MBBS seats. Recognising this problem, NMC has, for the first time, issued detailed guidelines on how to identify fake patients.
NMC guidelines state that if the assessor observes a large number of patients admitted on the day of assessment or the previous day, it could indicate fake admissions. Similarly, if the admitted patients have ailments that can be treated in the OPD with oral medications, those should also be considered fake admissions. Another criterion described by NMC to identify fake or ghost patients is admission without any evidence of investigations, such as X-rays, blood tests, etc., either before or after admission.
In pediatric wards, NMC guidelines add that fake patients can be identified if assessors find that most of the admitted children are playful and cheerful without any significant medical issues. One such instance was recorded when a medical college in Maharashtra applied to increase its MBBS intake, but all the children in the pediatric ward were “hale and hearty.”
Another red flag includes the admission of multiple patients from the same family or those admitted through preventive health checkups/camps, which may indicate fake patients.
The practice of admitting fake patients to fulfill bed occupancy requirements or other criteria has been a long-standing issue. If assessors note these irregularities, it will be considered a violation of NMC guidelines. In 2019, SC had barred a medical college in Bhopal from admitting new students for two years after it was found guilty of admitting fake patients.
