Preventing Corruption in Public Health

Abstract

Public health services can be exploited in the procurement of medical supplies, in influence peddling over prescription practices and drug testing, through poor service standards, and through over-billing and fraud. Understanding opportunity factors is, again, the key means to designing prevention systems and strategies. System vulnerabilities stem from excessive discretion, lack of scrutiny and transparency, and under-enforcement or non-enforcement of rules. The chapter reports on a number of intervention studies that provide promising examples of evaluated practice in corruption prevention in hospitals.