Faking record-breaking records

Academics in any dental / medical college go hand-in-hand with treatment of patients. Students are required to 'try out' their newly acquired theoretical knowledge by working on real human beings!

Some years ago, dental colleges received a new order - that there must be plenty of 'clinical material' for every department. Only then would students be able to learn dentistry properly. A noble thought, that. However, a wildly inflated number of patients was required to fulfil the daily quota - and most colleges were unable to attract that many patients in a week, leave alone a day.

पानी मिलाना, or adding some fake records to boost up the numbers, became the norm. Then it became a game for the inspectors to verify these records at random, and catch out discrepancies. How a departmental record of a patient did not match with the main register. How the amount of dental materials given out by the store did not match the amount of work done. How cash collection records for a given day did not match the number of patients or work done. How the treating dentist seemed to be absent on that particular day, yet signed the work.

Until one day. The wizards stepped in. The experts in creating foolproof, inspector-proof, undetectably fake records. So good were they in their teamwork, in creating records without loopholes on a daily basis, that their worth shot up in the eye of the managements. They loved these wizards. Who wants real patients, eh? Some institutions loved the way these experts made up for the shortfall in numbers. And then some colleges followed the bright path of faking entire records - with practically zero real patients.

One inspector from a government college once confided: I know your records are all fake, but all data and documents are there on record, so I cannot report that anything is wrong here. But we also handle a similar number of real patients, and we know that those registers don't remain so clean and shiny when they are used every day. 


“People cheat when they are afraid. When there is no cost to being wrong or confessing ignorance, there is no reason to cheat or fake comprehension.”
~ Leah Hager Cohen, I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance

Wisdom, honesty and expertise don't get you to the top in the world of dental education. Faking it does!