Premiere today for the free afternoon surgeries. According to the Minister of Health Adonis Georgiadis “we are approaching, for the first two weeks, 2,000 closed surgeries” with this number “rising daily at a very high speed”.

In total the free afternoon surgeries concern around 34,500 patients and start from the back to the front, i.e. from the longest wait to the shortest.

The government representative, Pavlos Marinakis, said that “they will be done 37,000 afternoon surgeries for patients who are, according to the unified list of surgeries, in waiting more than four months.

Patients who have been waiting for more than a year have already been notified and are in the process of pre-operative control.

“The number of scheduled appointments is expected to increase in the coming days as even more hospitals will participate in the program,” Mr. Marinakis.

Today at 15:30 Mr. Georgiadis will be at the Athens Ophthalmology Clinic for the start of the free afternoon surgeries.

Who is eligible for free afternoon surgery?

In order to be entitled to the free afternoon surgery, one must wait for more than a year, and as the Minister of Health has mentioned, there are some rare cases where the wait even reaches 4 years.

Through the Single Surgery List, each clinic communicates by phone with the 20 oldest cases, in order to proceed with the procedures for planning the surgery. If they do not wish to do so, they will be removed from the list. This will free up 20 surgeries per clinic and update the list. In order for the clinic to proceed to the next 20, it must have finished the pending with the previous 20.

The Ministry of Health has foreseen that some surgeries will be performed completely free of charge in private clinics and this firstly so as not to “block” the system in Public Hospitals and secondly because there are some surgeries that are quite specialized and cannot be performed in the National Health Service, according to officials of the Ministry of Health. Of the 54 million euros secured for free afternoon surgeries, 9 will go to private clinics.

“In some cities where we have too many operations for a certain type of surgery and therefore, the public system does not have time to do all these surgeries within a year, the system will be able to direct patients to the private sector, either with their doctor from the NHS, or with their doctor in the private sector and of course we will pay the costs”, explained the Minister of Health.