The private clinics requisitioned by the Greek government in the battle against Covid-19 will operate with medical staff deployed from the country’s public hospitals. This is revealed by newspaper efsyn that published also the relevant documents. Doctors in Thessaloniki, where the requisition of two clinics took place last week are up in arms.
“Unbelievable but absolutely true. The required private clinics of Thessaloniki will be staffed with medical and nursing staff from all hospitals in the city,” efsyn noted.
“The National Health System that already suffers from personnel shortage amid the pandemic is called to serve in the private clinics,” the newspaper wrote recalling a recent report in which it stressed that the requisition refers only to the infrastructure but not to personnel due to bureaucratic burdens.”
Medical doctors and nurses of private clinics can only work for the public system only if they are requisitioned too as they have private contracts with the private clinics.
In the document published by efsyn, health authorities order the “deployment” of doctors and nurses from Papanikolaou hospital to one of the requisitioned private clinics. The public doctors are ordered to move to the private clinics to train the staff there that has no experience in dealing with Covid-19.
It should be noted that dozens of frontline health workers in Thessaloniki are either infected with Covid-19 or ordered to self-isolation due to infections in their work places.
“It would be a bad joke if it wasn’t true,” Eleni Siotou, president of Papanikolaou hospital doctors union told efsyn.
The president of the Association of Hospital Doctors of Thessaloniki (ENITH), Daphne Katsimba, said in a statement a statement that “without a sense of elementary responsibility towards the hospital doctors, the nursing staff and the people of Thessaloniki, which counts dozens of dead and hundreds of seriously ill, doctors from AHEPA and Papanikolaou are ordered to move and strengthen a private clinic. At a time when doctors and nursing staff are overworked, there is shortage, they work without schedule, doing their best in wartime. When hundreds of public hospital employees are infected with the virus, the staff is screaming for help in agony…”
Even now the criminal policy of the government continues without a trace of shame,” the statement said among others.
PS the pandemic is a test not only for the citizens but also for any government in any country. The Greek government must be so in panic about the increasing number of deaths, hospitalizations in wards and ICUs that it believes only with spasmodic moves it can saves face. Because patients it can hardly save with this policies. Cries for help from overcrowded hospitals do not come only from Thessaloniki but also from other cities as state broadcaster ERT reported today.
Too bad we have no communism. Party would take care of everything, and there would be zero deaths from covid.