It emerged that "in order to increase the sales of their drugs, the sentence reads, the scientific representatives offered sums of money, trips, etc. to compliant doctors while the pharmacies involved actively collaborated with the doctors and representatives, accepting from them last, physician-sponsored drug orders.
The Court of Auditors also recognizes damage to the image of pharmacists
They prescribed drugs just to get money spent; the medicines then ended up in the garbage. Now, however, they will have to pay a heavy bill to the Region and a lot, over half a million euros as tax damage. In addition to seventy thousand euros as compensation as "damage to image". The investigation into the farmafraffa has not ended. Because after the plea bargains, the Court of Auditors has now come and condemned some of the general practitioners and pharmacists to pay monster compensation to the Health Service.
Only in Bari the doctor Francesco D'Atri was sentenced to seven hundred thousand euros in compensation, excluding monetary revaluation. While the pharmacists Antonio Potenza at 354 thousand, Domenico and Patrizia Potenza at 177 thousand and Vito Frontera at 65 thousand. The story began in 2002 when the ASL service realized that «out of about five thousand prescriptions received, it reconstructed the Court of Auditors. Approximately 2,400, signed by Dr. D'Atri, were found to be anomalous». In fact, an investigation by the Finance will ascertain, they were registered "to patients not assisted by him as they were under 12", "issued to the same patient on the same day with non-consecutive, but completely different progressive numbers", "issued to a same patient on the same day, some written in pen, some on the computer».
Or there were "several cases of medical prescriptions drawn up by the same patient on the same day up to a maximum of 15 prescriptions". From the investigations carried out in the following months, it emerged that «in order to increase the sales of their medicines, according to the sentence, scientific representatives offered sums of money, trips, etc. to compliant doctors, so that the latter would methodically prescribe their medicines, while the The pharmacies involved actively collaborated with doctors and informants, accepting doctor-sponsored drug orders from the latter, in the certainty that they would be prescribed by the same doctor in the shortest possible time".
The investigations again ascertained (Dr. D'Atri also negotiated a bargain) that "the doctor carried out substantial fraudulent prescriptions for drugs, the subject of illicit agreements with scientific informants, which he then personally collected from the pharmacies that actively collaborated in the illicit, and then get rid of them, through the secretary-partner (by throwing them in the Amiu bins or making them expire».
"Ultimately, it is amply proven that the false prescriptions, drawn up by D'Atri and sent both to the pharmacy managed by the Potenza family and to that of Frontera, we still read in the sentence of the Court of Auditors, concerned an enormous quantity of drugs, having to be considered more than likely the doctor's interest to achieve economic advantages on the part of scientific representatives was also linked to the purchase of drugs by wholesalers who subsequently sold them to pharmacies and that, in any case, the prescription of false prescriptions to dispose of expiring drugs constituted a collateral commitment by the doctor against the commitment of pharmacists to accept false prescriptions relating to direct orders".
So even pharmacies had an advantage because in this way they were able to dispose of medicines that would otherwise have had to be thrown away. The Court therefore established that there was damage, indicating it "to the extent of 50 per cent of all the prescriptions drawn up by D'Atri in the period from 2000 to 2003". While the other half ended up being taken over by pharmacists. But the story - and here's an important change - doesn't just concern material damage. The Court condemned, reiterating a concept that it particularly cares about, even the doctor (the only one with a final sentence) to compensate the ASL for the damage to his image.
«There is no doubt that his behavior has created damage to his image. And this Section has already had the opportunity to affirm for some time that the commission of a crime against the public administration by the public employee constitutes an event which, in addition to offending the interest protected from time to time by the penal law, can also involve an offense to the credibility and image of the public administration to which it belongs, values which are constitutionally protected; and furthermore that the proof of the damage to the image of the administration depends on the consequences in terms of credibility, efficiency, effectiveness, good organization and transparency which can have different amplitude and consistency, in terms of intensity and protraction over time».
