Referral Agencies

PROMIS will not pay bribes for patients. Our concerns regarding commissioned based referrals are that:

1. Commission based referring agents favour clinics that pay commissions and are thus offering biased advice based on their profits and not the patients needs.
2. Clinics are bribing therapists in order to get patients. One clinic is offering a £1000.00 extra bribe for every three patients referred. These therapists are registered with our professional organisation, the FDAP (http://www.fdap.org.uk/ ), and yet this organisation has done nothing to stop this practice. Ironically, the FDAP describes its purpose as being to "help improve standards of practice across the sector".
3. Patients can be charged more than double what the clinic would charge them as individuals.
4. Commission agents often sell their own treatment services, sometimes disguised as case management, directly competing with the clinics they are "independently" advising on.
5. Referring agents can be stakeholders in clinics, at the same time as offering "independent" advice without this interest and bias being declared to the Patient.
6. The problems with all of the above practices are regularly being discussed by both the referring agents and clinics but no one seems prepared to do anything about it.
7. This practice is illegal in the USA in most states. Practitioners who fall outside this state legislation, such as the clinicians who perform interventions, have rules in their code of ethics to explicitly preclude this activity. ( "The intervention specialist will not accept direct enumeration for making or receiving a referral of a patient.") See: http://www.intervention.com/AISMembers/AISEthics.htm We would expect the FDAP, and other regulatory organisations, to include a similar statement in their codes of ethics.

PROMIS will not pay any bribes to such agencies or therapists. We would ask patients to consider these factors when taking advice from these agents and to reconsider treatment with clinics who obtain their patients in this manner. Please ask the clinics directly if they pay bribes to referring agents and therapists to obtain their Patients.

It seems that other clinics have a similar stance regarding these “care managers” and “referents”.  I wonder if “care managers” will be “independently” recommending one of these clinics? :

Castle Craig Hospital

WARNING!

"Paying commission for referrals is unethical. Castle Craig does not follow this dubious practise".

Cygnet Health Care has a long standing policy of refusing to pay for referrals from referral agents.

These agents are given payments of up to 15% of the inpatient fees for recommending the services of providers who subscribe to this practise.

We believe that our quality of care and effectiveness of our programmes should be the rationale for referrals, not financial inducements.

We would urge people seeking treatment via referral agents to ask about fees as it is likely to effect the advice which they are given.

Declaration concerning Ethical Practice

While the payment of undeclared commission fees to secure referrals is not presently illegal in the United Kingdom, The Causeway Retreat believes it to be unethical and to contravene good medical practice.

The Causeway Retreat chooses to operate to the ethical standards laid down for doctors by the General Medical Council of the United Kingdom http://www.gmc-uk.org/. We therefore have a policy of neither offering nor requesting fees for professional referrals.