China last year punished 1,248 health workers for corrupt practices including taking commissions from drug companies to ply their drugs, and vowed to step up a crackdown this year, reports said yesterday.
The punishments were imposed after the Communist Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection asked the health ministry to investigate illegal deals by hospital staff, Xinhua news agency said.
Among their findings, health officials uncovered 216 cases of medical workers illegally buying and selling medicine for personal profit.
Of those, 179 cases which involved 10.99 million yuan (US$1.34 million) were handed over to judiciary departments, with 282 people punished, Xinhua quoted the head of the investigation team as saying.
Health workers were also found to be taking commissions from patients for surgery after they had already paid the normal hospital fees.
Authorities punished 142 health workers for the wrongdoings.
China's health workers are poorly paid. It has become common for patients to give doctors red envelopes stuffed with money as the only way to ensure they or their sick relatives receive good care.
Another 824 people were punished for charging other illegal medical fees, with 3.99 million yuan (US$487,000) involved, Xinhua said.
Health Minister Gao Qiang (
But some became corrupt and neglected their duties, he said, adding that those should be punished without mercy.
Gao said this year the ministry will continue to crack down on corruption in the health sector and take additional measures. He did not elaborate.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of