Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis is once again messing with doctors – and implicitly blaming them – for the country’s health system’s serious problems.
At this time he doesn’t mess with NHS doctors but with private doctors who have not responded to an invitation to offer their services to NHS units, where posts in important specialties are still not covered because there is no interest in taking part in the relevant adverts.
In fact, it voices the real demand for doctors so that the gaps can be filled.
The problems that exist in several areas are well known and significant.
Many provincial hospitals and medical institutions do not have all the necessary specialties, which leads to their shortage, which directly affects the quality of care or even the lives of the patients themselves, for example, a heart attack that could have been cured if it happened in Athens in some in the districts it is equivalent to a death sentence.
Efforts to fill these positions with advertisements often prove futile. The reason is that for many doctors what the NHS offers in terms of working conditions, with extremely long duty hours, the burden of responsibility of being the only doctor in the specialty and in fact very low fees, is not attractive. all if they can work as individuals or go abroad.
Common sense dictates what you do in this case to improve working conditions and provide incentives, wages, etc. After all, the public health system also has the advantage of continuity of work. And, of course, the fact that the latter cannot serve as a lure in a period of high job insecurity is further material evidence of the serious problems facing the National Social Security System and the low material and moral rewards it provides .
Except it still hasn’t done what common sense suggests. No pay raises, no incentives, no assurances that the goal is not to “have at least one cardiologist,” but to have properly staffed hospitals operating at full capacity.
On the contrary, the ministry itself, which now says it is ready to even use props for public hospitals, was more concerned with measures such as “legal wallet”and not with the support of the NSB.
And, of course, the same ministry that today calls on private individuals to withdraw is that over time, here the responsibility goes far into the past and is not limited to Adonis Georgiadis, – allocated considerable space to private individuals, discrediting and undermining the public protection system health. It is enough to think that, despite occasional announcements for the purchase of equipment for public hospitals or large donations of equipment to the hospital, if we get a referral for an X-ray or an MRI in a private diagnostic center in the end a resort.
To put it very simply: if you decide – for economic, (micro)political and other reasons – to invest in a policy that is largely based on the existence of private doctors and private diagnostic centers to close the gaps in the health care system that you know you create and support, it is impossible to go out and threaten private doctors with demands when things are difficult and you face the consequences of not supporting the public health system.
Ultimately, even if I agree that from a moral point of view private doctors in times of difficulty should have a “sense of gifts”, it is clear that the health care system cannot rely on occasional appeals to… patriotism (even if for a fee ) doctors. Because it is simply not a permanent solution to the problem, nor is it an institutionally correct way of doing things.
In any case, the matter is very serious and critical. One of the main parameters of what we usually call “sense of security” for citizens is the feeling that if something happens to them, they will have immediate access to a public health system that will solve their problems, not their wallet. If what is happening to them is treatable, it will indeed be cured and their life will be saved. That they will not live “happily ever after” because there is simply no anesthesiologist in their area. That if something is diagnosed at an early stage, it will indeed be cured.
Citizens of our country do not have this feeling.
And this, based on the facts and regardless of political or ideological position, is an indicator of the failure of public health policy.
Therefore, let the Minister of Health take all the responsibility that belongs to him to ensure that the health system actually offers the “sense of security” that I described above, and let him not try to shift to other responsibilities that are exclusively his ministry .