"Famous" surgeons will be ordered to work in other cities

Following the introduction of “afternoon surgeries”, Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis plans to organize teams of “celebrity” surgeons who will travel from hospital to hospital across the country to operate on patients.

In recent years, with doctors constantly retiring or resigning from Greece’s National Public Hospital System (NHS) and organic vacancies not being filled, it has become “normal” that doctors are forced to temporarily work in other hospitals many kilometers away to fill the gaps.

In fact, in many cases, doctors are forced to travel, at their own expense, several kilometers from their primary location to work at another hospital where there is a severe shortage of staff. For example, pathologists from the Patras and Tripoli hospitals serve the Pyrgos hospital, pathologists from Venizelio in Heraklion serve the Rethymno hospital, and the intensive care unit of the Agrinio hospital is supported by intensivists from Ioannina.

“The situation with the arbitrary orders of the administration of the 4th Ministry of Health on the forced daily transfer of pathologists from hospitals in Thessaloniki to hospitals in Xanthi and Drama has exceeded any limit of danger for patients and doctors. Colleagues are forced to travel for hours to Xanthi and Drama, receive 60 patients, medical history whom they do not know, visit them until the evening and at the same time be called to the emergency department, since the hospital has outpatients on duty every day. The next day, suffering from fatigue, they go to Thessaloniki, trying not to fall asleep while driving,” – said a statement issued on Thursday morning by the Federation of Greek Hospital Physicians’ Associations (OENGE).

“Famous” surgeons on the road

Now, to cope with the extremely long lists of patients waiting for surgery – more than 120,000 people – and as part of the “afternoon surgeries” operation, paid by the patient, regardless of whether he is insured or notMinister Adonis Georgiadis announced the creation of a system of visiting groups “famous” doctorsas he called them, who will not only travel from hospital to hospital, but also change the regional health department for one week.

“As part of the reforms, we are now trying to build a new NHS. This is not just an afternoon operation, it is part of the future,” Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis said on a television show on Wednesday. “If a patient has no financial means and cannot travel to a large hospital in Athens or Thessaloniki, should we permanently deprive him of the opportunity to receive the necessary operation? No, it is our responsibility to solve his problem.”he added.

In this sense, part of the reform, as the Minister explained, would be allowing surgical teams from one NHS hospital to go to operate in other hospitals.

“Since you can’t have the best neurosurgeons, the best surgeons, the best thoracic surgeons everywhere, you can’t do that. We’ll let the doctors from Evangelismos Hospital in Athens get together and form a group, and I’ll give an ‘example,’ and go for a week to operate in Kavala, to the north of Greece. And he said: guys, because you who are from Kavala want to have doctors who are famous doctors of the National Health Service, and they are good, and the whole surgical team, then come here [на операцию]”concluded the Minister of Health.

Legal measures of doctors

According to OENGE’s statement, “The health ministers of recent years, as well as the administration of the Department of Health, bear full and exclusive responsibility for the tragic shortage of staff in the hospitals of Xanthi and Drama. To hide this criminal responsibility, they continue to commit crimes, endangering both the patients of Xanthi and Drama and the doctors of Thessaloniki on a daily basis. All appeals have been exhausted, but the authorities are pointedly ignoring them.”emphasizes OENGE.

The hospital doctors also plan to hold a work meeting in the next couple of days. The Association emphasized that it was resorting to legal measures against the head of the Health Department, emphasizing: “We will prevent tragedy before it happens.”

PS In fact, as the opposition notes, the ruling “ND” disavows the very idea of ​​the so-called. “state health insurance”, for which Greek residents have been paying a significant portion of their budget for years. In addition to the loss of the population’s money, this could lead in the future to the liquidation of the conventionally existing health insurance system, since the majority of the population will strive to refuse payments that are meaningless from their point of view. Already, the middle class, not to mention the wealthier members of society, prefer to have private health insurance.

However, what should wage workers and low-income citizens do? Especially for those who have paid for state health insurance all their lives…

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