Taming doctors' greed....?

Salma Khalik continues the doctor bashing in today's Straits Times with a report entitled "Tame doctors' greed and protect patients", essentially addressing the GPs' greedy right to make money through dispensing of medications. Hmmmm........

This is really not a new issue. From time to time, this gets surfaced.... the MOH suggestively indicates that we can change.... meets a brick wall of resistance, then it's back to status quo.

www.GeraldTan.com has done us the kindness of logging some of these public dicussions all the way through from 2005-7.

For me a number of things are obvious....

a] There is an enormous professional conflict of interest when doctors make money from dispensing. This is without doubt. The Singapore Medical Association, in all its protestations have never disputed that reality. I am not sure what the average proportion of a GP's revenue come from dispensing, but it must be substantial.

Given this conflict of interest, the burden of responsibility must naturally fall upon the shoulders of the profession to explain how the patient/consumer can know if the best and most cost-effective drug solution is being prescribed. I don't want to suggest how often this occurs, and it may well be limited to the practices of a few bad-hats, but it is clear that over-prescribing and inappropriate prescribing are certainly practices which litter the medical landscape.

b] The only real defence for maintaining the system is 'patient convenience'.

This controversy, to my mind, can be easily resolved if only the Singapore Medical Association can bring itself to face up to the reality that there is a real conflict of interest. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in GP clinics wanting to meet their bottom line, and for doctors to bring home the bacon. But the lack of separation between the doctor's role from that of a money-making dispenser potentially compromises the doctor's objectivity in prescribing. I think it would certainly allow the journalists at SPH (and me too) sleep a lot easier if the SMA itself devices a strategy to deconflict the situation instead of pretending the problem doesn't exist.

One such solution might be to financially decouple without physically separating the two functions. Make clinics lease out the dispensing space to a bona fide dispenser and make it illegal for doctor/proprietors to make money from the dispensing rights. This will remove the financial incentives that compromise medical objectivity, without taking away the patient's convenience of receiving their medicines at the clinics.