NMC unveils norms to spot fake patients during college audits

NMC unveils norms to spot fake patients during college audits

DurgeshNandan.Jha@timesofindia.com  09.12.2024

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 nonserious 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, the National Medical Commission (NMC) has, for the first time, issued detailed guidelines on how to identify fake patients. The 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 outpatient department (OPD) with oral medications, those should also be considered fake admissions.

Another criterion described by the 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, the 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. Recently, such an instance was recorded when a medical college in Maharashtra applied to increase its intake of MBBS students from 100 to 150. The assessors found that all the patients admitted to the pediatric ward were “hale and hearty”. 

The NMC guidelines also say that admission of multiple patients from the same family, or those admitted in large numbers through preventive health checkups/camps may also be identified as fake patients.

It has been observed for a long time that some medical institutions/colleges indulge in admitting fake patients (people who do not require any in-patient treatment) to fulfil the requirement of bed occupancy, investigation, etc. “If the assessor makes the abovementioned observations in their remarks, it will be considered as indulgence of the institution in ‘fake patient practice’ which will be considered as a serious violation,” said an NMC official.