Statements by the General Secretary of AKEL A.Kyprianou after meeting with the Executive General Managers of state hospitals
AKEL C.C. Press Office, 22nd March 2021, Nicosia
I would like to thank the General Boards of Public Hospitals for responding to our invitation to discuss issues related to public hospital’s operation.
Through them, I would like to thank once again all the staff working in public hospitals for their role in confronting the Covid-19 pandemic, often with great zeal, overcoming many objective and subjective difficulties they face. They have made superhuman efforts to carry out their duties and we want to congratulate them. The second thing I would like to say is that public hospitals, we all say, will constitute the General Health System’s backbone. But to effectively fulfill their role they must be allowed to operate as efficiently and competitively as possible.
We have proceeded to approve relevant legislation for the autonomy of public hospitals, so we consider it imperative to let hospitals operate autonomously and not to try to have a centre that will decide without even asking in many cases for the opinion of the people involved in public hospital’s daily work. I don’t hide from you that what we have heard about the situation in public hospitals has worried us to a great extent, so our demand is to proceed decisively with their autonomy and to let public hospitals operate as efficiently as possible, to support themselves financially so that they can deal with the situation created by the Covid pandemic.
We are adamant that part of the problems caused by the pandemic must be shouldered by the private sector too, so that everything is not burdened on the public sector, while the private sector is sent all those cases that yield only revenue. At the same time, we appeal to the Board of state health services (OKYPY) to discuss with and listen to the views of the boards of public hospitals before proceeding to take any decisions.
I want to assure them that as AKEL we will be on their side. We will seek as soon as conditions permit, to pay visits to each separate hospital in order to discuss very specific issues that concern them, reiterating of course that what interests us more than anything else is that the procedures provided by the relevant legislation are operating and that the necessary structures permitting the public sector to function flexibly and efficiently are in place.
