… your university hospital is the most treacherous part of campus. There’s lots of money at stake, so corruption is highly likely. Conflict of interest among your professors may be rampant. There’s always someone on the staff stealing oxycontin to sell it. Some of your anesthesiologists are addicts.
Cowboys on the surgery team try this and that without bothering with the institutional review board. Since you don’t really pay attention to the doctors you allow to affiliate, some of them will turn out to run pill mills or, like UCLA’s Arnold Klein, will embarrass you in other ways.
You try to make the hospital a big profit center, but that almost never works. Meanwhile, as in this story from the University Medical Center Göttingen, some of your surgeons are managing to make it work quite nicely on a personal basis.
A surgeon identified as Dr. Aiman O. is suspected of fraudulently manipulating dozens of his patients’ test results, making them appear sicker than they were to get them liver transplants more quickly — and possibly putting them ahead of people who more desperately needed them. The case first emerged in late July at the University Medical Center Göttingen, in the northern German state of Lower Saxony, from where the senior physician has been suspended since November for allegedly tampering with some 23 transplant cases. A gastroenterologist suspected of involvement has also been suspended.
There’s huge money in this. Truly rich, truly desperate people will pay amazing sums for an organ, and all you have to do is shove aside other sick people who’ve been following the rules and waiting.