Free surgeries to cut waiting times
Starting November 28, Greece will introduce a program of free afternoon surgeries aimed at reducing long waiting times for patients. Funded by the Recovery and Resilience Fund, this initiative is expected to benefit up to 37,000 patients who have been waiting for surgery for over four months, according to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
Deputy Health Minister Marios Themistocleous explains that the program will prioritize patients strictly by wait time, starting with those who have waited the longest. Initially, the program will be implemented solely at public hospitals, but if delays persist, private clinics will be included starting January-February. During this period, paid afternoon surgeries, which began last March and have served about 6,000 patients, will be halted.
Patients will be attended to based on the length of their wait. For example, if a clinic has 100 patients waiting for surgery, the surgeon will initially operate on the 20 longest-waiting patients, excluding emergencies. If public hospital surgeons do not participate, private sector resources will be used. If the top 20 cases are not handled in a reasonable timeframe, these patients will be referred to private hospitals. Patients refusing surgery in the private sector without a valid reason (e.g. being abroad or having a health issue) will be removed from the list.
The program will run until the end of 2025, during which paid afternoon surgeries will not be conducted unless a hospital has a wait time of less than four months.
“In the first phase, the program will only involve public hospitals. In the second phase, the private sector will be included,” noted Themistocleous. This could mean public hospital doctors operating on public patients at private facilities or private hospital staff performing the surgeries.
Hospitals and chief surgeons have known about the new system for about two weeks. The details on doctor compensation, patient selection, system monitoring, and other aspects of the program will be outlined in a forthcoming ministerial decision.
An amendment to the personal doctor bill, allocating €50 million from the Recovery and Resilience Fund, is expected to be voted on Wednesday.
Efforts to reduce surgery wait times began a year ago, including a cleanup of surgery lists and the creation of a unified waiting list. The data revealed that the majority of long waits involved five types of surgeries, accounting for almost 70% of cases: knee and hip replacements, hernia repairs, cholecystectomies, and cataracts.
Kathimerini
