With hospitals at breaking point, government poised for conscription of doctors

With many hospitals in northern Greece and Thessaly at the verge of collapse due to the enormous and steadily growing number of COVID-19 cases, the government is poised to proceed with the conscription of private doctors if they continue to ignore the government’s plea for them to join the battle to prevent a disaster in the National Health System.

“We are at the verge of going ahead with conscription if necessary and if private doctors do not respond,” said Health Minister Thanos Plevris.

Given the dire situation at hospitals in various regions of the country, the government is reportedly in the process of threshing out a Plan B, the details of which are not yet clear.

What is certain is that the government has ruled out another lockdown. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in a recent interview said that the situation has not spun out of control.

The health ministry will issue a final call for private doctors to help staff state hospitals – the only ones that treat COVID-19 patients – and if they do not respond the government will go ahead with conscription, as STAR television reported.

The hardest hit regions, where the vaccination rate is exceptionally low, are Central Macedonia (including Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, where even large hospitals are at the breaking point), Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, and Thessaly.

SOS from hospital doctors, patients on cots

Over the last days, hospital doctors have appeared on newscasts to issue impassioned pleas for backups, and some have said their hospitals are treating patients on cots borrowed from other hospitals.

The president of the Association of Athens-Piraeus Hospital Doctors (EINAP), Matina Pagoni, painted a grim picture today of the situation at major Athens hospitals, noting that on 7 November the large Gennimatas State Hospital in Athens went through a “Saint Bartholomew’s night” [a metaphoric reference to the massacre] and was forced to borrow cots from the nearby state hospital Sotiria.

The large Attikon Hospital in the Athens area is treating 48 patients on cots.

The conscription plan will include various medical specialties, which did not respond to government incentives for them to pitch in, and will reportedly involve fewer than 100 doctors, an extremely low number given the critical situation at many hospitals.

At the same time hospital doctors from areas that are less pressured will be transferred to the most embattled areas.

Non-COVID patients that are currently being treated on cots at hospitals that are hugely overburdened may be transferred to private hospitals “if necessary”.

Opposition parties have called on the government to requisition private hospitals and clinics, a prospect that the government has ruled out.

In areas under epidemiological pressure, ICUs that are now half COVID and half non-COVID patients will go to 60 percent COVID patients.

Sources said that at Thessaloniki’s large Papanikolaou Hospital the night shift tonight began with no vacant beds. By 6pm, there were 25 admissions, with four people intubated outside the ICU and eight patients awaiting to be intubated.

Thessaloniki hospital doctors said that nearly 100 percent of intubated patients are unvaccinated.

At Thessaloniki’s Ippokrateio hospital, eight children and three pregnant women are being treated with COVID, and the number of COVID patients is twice what it was in October, 2020.

In the city of Volos, the public hospital is filled to capacity. The president of the regional Magnesia prefecture hospital doctors said that, “The hospital has collapsed and certain people are afraid to say so. Yesterday, one doctor was treating 110 patients.”