The government must proceed with a unified national plan to also include private hospitals
Statement by AKEL-Left-New Forces Parliamentary Representative Giorgos Loucaides
AKEL C.C. Press Office, 29th December 2020, Nicosia
AKEL expresses its deep concern about the situation in which the public health sector has found itself, which has taken on the entire responsibility for the in-hospital tackling of the pandemic.
Once again we express our gratitude to the health workers, who in extremely adverse conditions are making superhuman efforts to save lives and halt the effects of the pandemic.
Without doubt, the conditions in which we as a society are waging this battle would have been much better had the government not imposed the severe underfunding of the public health system for a number of years. But even if it had made use of all the previous months to prepare the public health sector for the effective as possible preparation for the second wave, instead – as a relevant European survey has revealed – it spent less than half the European average on confronting the pandemic.
With the most urgent task being the saving of human lives and making the restrictive measures and sacrifices that citizens are subject to yield results, we call on the government to focus more on the substance and less on communication considerations. We call on it to proceed even belatedly to the study and implementation of the 18 proposals submitted by AKEL from the beginning of the pandemic. We also call on it, even at this stage, to proceed with a unified national plan that will also include private hospitals, in addition to the general practitioners who are already being utilized within the framework of the National Health Scheme.
Regardless of the government’s responsibilities, given the critical limit the public health sector has reached, but also with the pandemic rising uncontrollably for some weeks now, we call once again on citizens themselves to show the utmost responsibility, protecting themselves and those around them.
