Newz Desk, Durgapur: In a major crackdown on unfair billing practices, the West Bengal Clinical Establishment Regulatory Commission (WBCERC) has declared that private hospitals cannot charge patients for laundry services or biomedical waste disposal. The Commission termed both charges illegal and directed all private hospitals to immediately remove these cost heads from their billing software.
The directive was issued after a complaint exposed alarming anomalies in hospital billing. In several private hospitals, families often do not scrutinise the detailed bill breakdown, but when they do, shocking fees sometimes surface. One such case involved a Kolkata-based private hospital that billed nearly ₹18,000 under “laundry charges” and “biomedical waste management.” The commission has ordered the hospital to refund all such charges collected over the past year, and to immediately remove these items from its billing software.
Commission chairperson and former judge Justice Ashim Banerjee said the hospital’s billing violated both earlier advisories and provisions of the West Bengal Clinical Establishments (Registration, Regulation and Transparency) Act, 2017.
“A hospital’s licence requires it to clean biomedical waste and wash linen as part of its operational costs. These cannot be billed separately,” Banerjee said, calling the practice “very unethical.”
The commission also flagged violations by INK, directing it to refund ₹32,649 to the family for failure to provide mandatory discounts on medicines and consumables.
“Hospitals can charge separately for specialised services such as ventilation or intubation, but standard items like linen or waste disposal must be built into bed charges,” another official said.
Key Directives Issued by the Commission
- Hospitals must immediately remove laundry charge and biomedical waste disposal charge options from their billing systems.
- Any money collected under these two heads in the last one year must be refunded to patients without delay.
- Hospitals must contact patients or their families based on billing records and return the wrongly collected funds.
- Any hospital still levying such charges will face regulatory action.
The decision is expected to bring relief to thousands of patients who have long complained of unexplained and inflated charges in private hospitals. The Commission has also urged families to check their bills carefully and report irregularities immediately.
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