Professional Misconduct in Healthcare: Conceptualising a Factional Elite System

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 15: Healthcare Organizations

Abstract

Using the sociology of professions as a theoretical lens, we explore how misconduct by elite public-healthcare professionals adversely affected rural communities. We examine a public healthcare system in which senior physicians engaged collectively in unethical practices that pressured economically disadvantaged patients to pay high prices for private healthcare. This issue appears to be inadequately theorised in the literature on professional misconduct. Using rich qualitative data from public hospitals and private clinics in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, we show that the public healthcare system contained a factional elite system consisting of a network of medical professionals and affiliated organizations. Senior doctors, private medical laboratories, and pharmaceutical suppliers collaborated in unethical behaviour that worsened the prevailing social inequalities and constituted professional misconduct.

Authors

• Farooq Ahmad

• Rashedur Chowdhury, University of Essex