Ukraine, the most corrupt nation in Europe,even the National Cancer Institute

Ukraine’s National Cancer Institute occupies three smoke-grey, six‑story blocks in a residential district on the edge of Kiev. The external walls are tiled, when Soviet workmen completed the facade, they built the date,“1968” into it. Since then, maintenance appears to have been erratic.Half of Ukraine’s men, and a fifth of its women, smoke; the national diet is heavy with animal fat; the national drink is vodka. Radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spread thyroid cancers throughout the 1980s generation, increasing the incidence among children tenfold. There are few family doctors, which means that breast, prostate and bowel tumors often go undetected for months. Survival rates for these cancers are among the worst in Europe. Professor Igor Shchepotin took charge of the Cancer Institute, which is both the country’s leading cancer hospital and its premier research institution, and was granted extensive powers to mend Ukraine’s health, including a budget independent of the health ministry, so that he could buy his own medicines and equipment. In Britain, he would be known as the “Cancer Tsar”, in Ukraine, he is called the “chief oncologist”.
It feels like a place where patients can come knowing that the goal is to get them well again. But three surgeons working here, a former health minister, patients and anti-corruption activists all claim that this is not the whole truth. They claim that the hospital, like government bodies all over Ukraine, appears to have been infected by corruption. “Presumably there is money,” said Konstantin Sidorenko, a consultant anaesthetist at the institute. “But for some reason that money doesn’t reach the most important places, like intensive care. So it means we have to earn everything ourselves.”
He explained that almost all of his doctors collect the money from patients, then pass it on to him. He uses it to maintain the machines that keep his patients alive. These are the realities of being a doctor in Ukraine. Shchepotin, the head of the institute, refused to comment on the specific allegations made by Sidorenko that such practices were taking place at the institute.