Georgiadis on the arrest of doctor at Hippocrateio: “Bribery has no place in the NHS, I loathe it”

Referring to the arrest of a doctor at Hippocrateio hospital on charges of bribery, he said that the hospital administration immediately suspended the doctor. “This is an administrative measure, whether he is guilty or innocent will be decided by the court,” the Minister stressed, also referring to his own post where he essentially announced the hospital’s decision.

“The fakelaki has no place in the NHS. I fight it, I abhor it, I loathe it. Fakelaki means extorting money from people for a service that the NHS provides for free. And that I absolutely do not want,” continued the Minister of Health, adding: “In response to doctors who say ‘the money we earn is too little,’ I’ve given them the right to practice private work in parallel, so that if a doctor wants to make more money, he can go in the afternoon, operate in a private hospital, and earn more legally, and taxed.”

When asked if “everything runs like clockwork” in the NHS, Mr. Georgiadis said: “In a National Health System with 127 hospitals, 368 health centers and 1,500 regional clinics handling 85,000 cases a day—25 million a year—I am not foolish enough to believe that ‘everything runs like clockwork’ and that no one suffers anywhere. But what I do believe is that the system’s progress is evident.”

As he noted, if ten years ago, out of 85,000 daily cases, 15,000 involved suffering, now it is 5,000, and if this continues, it will be 1,000.

“Unfortunately, someone will always suffer. We must learn to defend the NHS. I don’t say we should defend the NHS in order to hide its problems. I’m the first one to go ‘on camera’ in hospitals and talk about the problems. It’s one thing to talk about the NHS’s problems, which we want to solve, and another to spend all day undermining our trust in the system. The system works, and we have one of the best systems in Europe,” he concluded.