Or it's possible that all countries suffer from the same problem, because bureaucracy attracts the corrupt and morally bankrupt people. it doesn't even pay well so the "good" people move on.

Anecdotal example, We have had a nurse coming out 2x weekly to redo a dressing for my daughter for the past 3 months. every single time they leave ~30-40 dressings (its only changed once per day), a set of scissors, spray for removing dressing, 10x as much gauze as we need. 100s of saline single use capsules. we have filled up 2 chemist warehouse bags FULL of stuff. my wife works in the hospital and knows how much this stuff costs, she thinks its at least 2-3k worth of stuff.

there was nothing wrong with giving us some extras if we are running low, but we have shown them the size of the pile of excess stuff we have and they say its fine just hold onto it and chuck it out down the track if we no longer need it. they have a allocation amount per patient and are told to use it up.

Now why would this be the case? should they not be returning unused items? who benefits from this wastage? The only reason I can see is the person in-charge of acquisition and maintenance of stock levels gets some kind of kickback based on sales/consumption of their goods. this will be some mid level management position that will basically never get questioned and just a singular example that I have no doubt is present in every single department across the 10s of thousands of civil servants there are.

despite my wife working with the hospital, she doesn't even know how to report this as a problem. no-one is interested in hearing about it because its a conflict nobody wants to put their own ass on the line by taking a side in. Because no-one has any incentive to fix the problem, it goes on unresolved.