“And we are strengthening the Santorini hospital, and we want to upgrade it, and we want it to be a hospital – a pilot, how can hospitals – which operate in terms of private law, and with PPPs, and with the possibility to have doctors with contracts and outside the hard core of the NSS – to provide a very good service to the citizens and to be the pilot who will lead us on how the hospitals should operate “, said the Minister of Health, Thanos Plevris, answering earlier today, in Parliament to a topical question of the SYRIZA MP, Nikos Syrmaleniou about the Santorini hospital.
“The facilities that will be given to the Santorini hospital will be a model for how hospitals can operate that provide the best possible services and have the best benefit for the Greek patient and the Greek taxpayer,” said Thanos Plevris.
“The logic of the Santorini hospital was to lay the foundations so that we can see how hospitals around the world operate, as autonomous units that serve public health, which are under the supervision of the Ministry of Health but also operate with much more flexible procedures. “, Said Thanos Plevris and added that this is the model that the government wants to follow in the hospitals which are donated by the Niarchos Foundation.
“We believe that a hospital unit can operate as flexibly as possible, with specific budgets, with specific goals, with a specific operation, with the potential to have its own revenue, which it will return to the hospital itself – let alone to the Santorini hospital that has “to operate with a view to providing the best possible services to the Greek citizen, but thinking of each hospital and operating on terms with the best possible cost-benefit ratio”, said the Minister of Health and added: “We believe that those these hospitals have the potential to move and in terms of private law, they can provide the best possible service “.
Earlier, SYRIZA MP Nikos Syrmalenios had stated that the inclusion of the General Hospital of Thira in the NSS is a universal request of the residents of Santorini and complained that the hospital is on a path of devaluation and weakening. “We opened the Santorini hospital in July 2016, when for 4-5 years you kept it closed – a building ready, fully equipped – with the intention of handing it over to private individuals. We opened the hospital within the memoranda, with a budget of 5 million euros per year, under the supervision of AEMY at the time, because that ensured flexibility in recruitment, supplies, etc. But today things are completely different. “We are in the middle of a pandemic, there are no budget commitments, Santorini with its 17,000 permanent residents, the surrounding islands and the 1.5 million tourists, on an annual basis, needs and requires a strong and upgraded hospital,” he said. Nikos Syrmalenios who called on the Minister of Health to inform the Parliament if the ministry intends to strengthen the hospital with permanent recruitments and if it will include it in the NSS so that there is a strong hospital on an island that is one of the first tourist destinations in the world. He also asked for additional incentives for the health workers who will take up service in Santorini, since the cost of living there is very high.
“You are asking me to include the Santorini hospital in the NSS, when you did not include it”, the Minister of Health replied and added that in October 2019, there were 24 doctors of various specialties and 8 doctors of rural service. Today, there are 31 doctors of various specialties and 8 rural service doctors. Mr. Plevris also pointed out that the current administration received the artificial kidney unit without operation and today serves a seconded nephrologist, director of the NSS and there are a total of 11 dialysis machines and two spare, in 2020 1,666 dialysis operations were performed while in 2021 2.600. “In no case can you say that we are going to devalue the hospital. “On the contrary, we are staffing it in the best possible way,” said the Minister of Health.
“Mr. Minister, you just told us your goal is for the hospital to be privatized. That is, what your predecessors did not achieve before 2014, which you had closed, but then Mr. Georgiadis directly told us that it could not work because the public could not afford to finance this hospital “, commented Nikos Syrmalenios, noting that the Diocese has donated the hospital, provided it operates in a public manner. The MP said that the hospital under the SYRIZA government joined the AEMY and not the NSS, due to the memoranda. He also stressed that today instead of recruitment there are resignations of health, due to the cost of living.
“Flexibility is given when these legal entities operate in terms of private law,” the health minister insisted, adding: “We need much more flexible schemes, both for procurement and recruitment and for their entire operation.” The hospital of Santorini, we will have it as a model. You will see how it will work and be able to have resources from tourism, resources that will go back to public health for the benefit of citizens. Why can not we discuss that a hospital located in Santorini, can not have huge revenues. On an island with a huge number of tourists. “Especially the artificial kidney unit, in itself can be a pole of attraction, as there are over 100,000 kidney patients in Europe, who want to go on vacation, in countries that have reliable units to be able to do their treatment.”
In the new NSS, the philosophy of the government, said Mr. Plevris, is for these units to work as best as possible with the practices of private law and not with logics of the hard core that led to a vicious circle, many times. “This is a policy that we have in our program, we have announced it and we believe that the public good of health can be served, not through privatizations, as you say, but also through partnerships with the private sector, where they can be go ahead “, said Mr. Plevris and added that this will be a policy for the benefit of the patients.
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