Topic Guide: Corruption in Health Services

Establishing and enforcing quality standards in healthcare services is a good starting point to tackle corruption. By developing quality standards and testing hospital performance against these criteria, anti-corruption practitioners can identify problem areas and red flags in service delivery. Rating systems can also be used to incentivise health service providers to raise standards. Patients can also be involved in quality control through citizen scorecards, crowdsourcing platforms and patient feedback. Quality testing is especially important for drugs and medical supplies. By testing samples distributed among patients and comparing them to standard certified drugs, effective auditing can be undertaken to identify fraudulent drugs and their suppliers.