Mar.5, 202
The dramatic situation that prevails in the hospitals of the Greek capital is reflected in a letter by the director in Internal Medicine at “Agia Olga” hospital in Nea Ionia suburb of western Athens.
In his letter to the hospital management and colleagues where he announced his resignation, Dr Ioannis Ioannidis spoke of “doctors on the verge of insanity”, of “covid-patients along with non-covid patients” and of “lawmakers complaining that doctors haven’t checked their relatives yet.”
In the letter written on Thursday night, Ioannidis said that on that morning Agia Olga was the only hospital on duty to accept Covid- and internal medicine cases.
He described that “patients were still waiting to be checked by doctors still at 9 p.m, while over 25 new admissions were made by that time. My doctors are on the verge of insanity. The 6th floor is full of positive cases – also outside the Covid-clinic – in conditions of coexistence with non-Covid cases. The hospital is full with internal medicine cases, over 70 patients in total. The coordination team has asked for discharges until 11 a.m. (we are still waiting for substantial help by other doctors and support.)
And in the midst of all this, phone-calls come from MPs’ offices for relatives’ complaints, that we did not check their “own people.”
The director sharply criticized the new design system the Health Ministry introduced on Wednesday by turning more public hospital and/or their Cardiovascular and Internal Medicine clinics to Covid-only.
“this is not exactly a design achievement but a complete failure and ignorance of the real circumstances,” the director wrote.
“Along with my sadness -and the shame I feel -, please, accept his immediate resignation from the position of director of the Internal medicine Department where I only played a decorative role, anyway,” he stressed.
He concluded that he maintains the position of director in 1st.Internal Medicine clinic in order to be able to sustain its operation in these critical times.”
Public Hospital Doctors have sharply criticizing the Health Ministry of failing to enhanced the public health care system and did nothing in this direction in the one year of the pandemic. The new system has done nothing else than ‘turning public hospitals into one-disease facilities,” they said in a statement on Wednesday evening.
Some hospitals now assigned to take over all non-Covid cases from hospitals turned to Covid-only are not even fully equipped to do so.
It should be stressed that the changes in the hospitals operation was announced on Wednesday and implemented immediately apparently without the necessary preparation on the spot.
Health Minister Vassilis Kikilias had said that they had the “emergency plan ready for quite some time.”
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PS Knowing the famous Greek realities, they most likely took the “Emergency Plan” out of the “drawer” on the fourth day the confirmed daily infections in Attica exceeded 1,000.
Day 1 to 3 they were trying to locate the Plan, remember the name in der which the File was saved and who had the printed version.
Published at www.keeptalkinggreece.com
