Rights Groups Call for Probe of World Bank Hospital Funding

More than 50 human rights organizations, nonprofits and international development experts are calling on the World Bank to investigate its health-care investments in Africa and Asia, citing Bloomberg News articles about alleged patient abuses.

In stories published this year, Bloomberg found patients at World Bank-funded hospitals who said they were denied emergency medical care and held because of unpaid bills. The reporting also showed how whistleblowers raised alarms about what they called pressure to boost revenue by performing unnecessary procedures at one hospital in Kenya. Officials at another hospital in Pakistan alleged that financial reports were falsified. The hospital companies involved denied abusing patients or prioritizing profit over care.

Oxfam International, Bank Information Center, a Kenyan medical practitioners union and 57 other organizations and experts, urged the International Finance Corp., the arm of the World Bank that invests in businesses, to freeze any additional funding to for-profit health-care providers. They also called for an investigation by the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, an independent office responsible for addressing complaints from people impacted by IFC projects. And they asked the bank to put in place procedures to ensure that those harmed by its investments could seek effective remedies.

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