New Delhi: Laboratory tests prescribed by “non-medical staff” carried out on “ghost patients”, duplicate and non-existent mobile numbers on registration forms — these are some of the findings of a report that has become the basis for Delhi Lieutenant Governor (L-G) V.K. Saxena’s recommendation of a CBI probe into alleged malpractices at mohalla clinics in the national capital.
Mohalla clinics are a flagship initiative of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led government in Delhi. They were launched in 2015 to provide the first point of medical care, free of cost.
Sources in the L-G’s office told ThePrint that the alleged irregularities came to light during random monitoring of mohalla clinics in August last year.
Two layers of malpractices were observed, the sources said — doctors and other medical staff of seven clinics “adopting fraudulent ways to mark their attendance through pre-recorded videos, and non-medical staff prescribing tests for non-existent patients”.
The sources also said that there were thousands of cases where patients who had supposedly registered for diagnostic tests — outsourced to two private labs — had left either the contact number column blank on the registration form or penned down numbers like “999999999” or “000000000”.
Hundreds of registration forms also had duplicate phone numbers, they added.
Following the random monitoring of the clinics, a status report was prepared by the director at the Directorate of Family Welfare and submitted to the special secretary in the Delhi health and family welfare department. ThePrint has seen the report.
According to the report, medical staff at seven mohalla clinics in Shahdara, North East and South West districts of Delhi had marked their attendance through pre-recorded videos between June 2022 and March 2023.
Sources in the L-G’s office said that after the fraudulent practice of marking attendance was noticed, testing data from the two private labs was ordered to be reviewed by the Delhi health secretary. This data was examined by a system analyst of the health department in October last year.
The report states that even in the time period when doctors and staff were marking their attendance through pre-recorded videos and were absent from the clinics, lab tests were being recommended, which is a clear violation of the Standard Operating Procedures of Mohalla Clinics.
The report was submitted by the special secretary in the health department on 6 December, 2023, to the health secretary, and recommended a “detailed vigilance inquiry” to assess the financial losses to the Delhi government and alleged collusion of doctors and medical staff.
Special Secretary (Vigilance) YVVJ Rajasekhar made his own observations in the status report and forwarded it to the Delhi chief secretary Tuesday, recommending a CBI probe into the mohalla clinics.
Referring to the CBI probe launched into alleged irregularities in the operations of mohalla clinics in 2018 on the recommendations of then L-G Najeeb Jung, Rajasekhar noted that the new facts on the functioning of the clinics should be seen in “conjunction” with the old case.
“On the one hand, the setting up of Aam Aadmi Mohalla Clinics (AAMCs) has already been under the scanner, now even its functioning is also circumspect as the actual data is being manipulated/distorted to serve vested interests at the cost of the exchequer. In both the cases, the overall loser is the public as no accountability and transparency is shown in executing the processes,” Rajasekhar noted in the report.
Asked about the alleged irregularities, Delhi Health Minister and AAP leader Saurabh Bharadwaj told the media Thursday that all bureaucrats running the health and family welfare department had not been appointed by the AAP-led government.
He further said that the AAP government had in fact given in writing that the health secretary and Director General of Health Services must be removed.
He also attacked the BJP, which is in power at the Centre, asking that if it was raising fingers at the functioning of the Delhi health department, why couldn’t it sack the errant officers?
“Who is creating ghost patients? Minister is creating ghost patients? It must be the officers. Who are these officers? They are not taking action against them but rather protecting them. Why don’t they just sack those officers? We have given our proposals in writing, even before the Supreme Court,” Bhardwaj said at the press conference.
Meanwhile, the home ministry Friday ordered a CBI probe into alleged supply of substandard drugs to government hospitals including mohalla clinics.
A look at the data
ThePrint reviewed the findings of the system analyst in the report on mohalla clinics.
It documented 15,463 lab tests that were ordered from five clinics in Delhi’s Jaffar Kalan, Ujwa, Shikarpur, Gopal Nagar and Dhansa between February and September last year.
The report stated that 52 registration forms had no mobile numbers while 358 forms had mobile numbers of patients starting with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 — a series that does not exist in India — while there was repetition of 71 mobile numbers more than 15 times.
All these tests were given to Agilus Diagnostics, the report stated.
In the same time period, at two mohalla clinics in Jagjeet Nagar and Bihari Colony, 2,262 diagnostic tests referred to another private company, Metropolis Healthcare, had registration forms with 26 mobile numbers repeated 10 times or more, the report said.
The health department of the Delhi government had outsourced the lab tests services to these companies in February 2023, the report added.
Between July and September 2023, when the health department pulled the test data for the two labs from all mohalla clinics, polyclinics, hospitals and dispensaries across Delhi for analysis, it found that a total of 85,616 tests had been given to Metropolis Healthcare.
In these, the mobile number ‘9999999999’ was used in as many as 3,092 cases while 111 mobile numbers were used 15 or more times, according to the report.
In the same period, Agilus Diagnostics was given 5,21,221 tests, of which 11,657 registration forms had ‘0000000000’ as the mobile number of patients while 8,199 forms were without any mobile number.
Additionally, 817 mobile numbers were repeated on 15 or more occasions while 42 registration forms had mobile numbers starting with the digits 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, the report said.
This report has been updated to reflect that the home ministry’s Friday CBI probe order is not linked to this particular matter. The error is regretted.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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