CANCER patients, their relatives and friends have been camped outside the Presidential Palace for 11 days now, in protest against government plans to close down the Nicosia General Hospital oncology unit. Last Tuesday, they took their protest to the House of Representatives while on Friday they went to the Health Ministry to demand the resignation of the minister, Dina Akkelidou, who had reportedly given them misleading information about the government’s plans. The Committee of Cancer Patients and Relatives for the Oncology Centre, which is running the protest campaign, has vowed to fight on, until the decision is reversed.
The protesters could easily be dismissed as a bunch of loony publicity seekers, hell-bent on embarrassing the government just for the sake of it. After all, it is the government’s responsibility to decide state health policy and how to make the best use of its resources. It could be argued that it is unheard of to have a small group of people, with minimal knowledge of health issues, dictating health policy through public protests. This is the job of health policy planners, who have a much broader understanding of society’s health needs and take into account a host of factors before arriving at their decisions.
Such arguments would certainly be valid in more advanced societies, in which policy planning is carried out by professionals, with the support of a range of experts. Cyprus, unfortunately, is nowhere near this level yet, and it seems the protestors are correct in claiming that the ministry has made a big mistake in deciding to close down the Nicosia General Hospital’s oncology unit. From the arguments they use to oppose the closure, it would appear that the campaigners have studied the decision and its implications much more rigorously than the ministry’s policy-makers have done.
Problems are already being experienced now that the oncology unit is being wound down. This has been a gradual process, with the number of beds for cancer patients reduced from 22 to 18; they will soon be reduced to 10. When the capital’s new general hospital will be opened it will have no oncology unit and all patients will be sent to the Bank of Cyprus Oncology Centre, which has 26 beds. At present, with the hospital ward still operating, there is still a shortage of beds for cancer patients, so what will happen when it closes down?
The ministry argues that an oncology centre will be opened at Limassol general hospital to help cover the country’s needs and give easier access to patients from the surrounding regions rather than force them to make the long trek to the capital. But when will this unit be completed? According to Christos Andreou, one of the campaigners, the government has not yet even awarded the contract for the construction of an oncology centre at Limassol General Hospital. Given the snail’s pace at which government works, it could be four years before the building is ready and the equipment is in place. But if the new Nicosia General Hospital is ready by next year (and this is a big ‘if’) we will have two years with only the Bank of Cyprus centre serving all patients, even though it is a fact that it does not have the capacity to do so. It is turning away patients now that the hospital centre is still operating.
What will the Health Ministry do in the intervening years? It would be no surprise if the ministry’s so-called policy-makers had not considered this possibility and have no ‘plan B’. Their inability to plan has been illustrated by the new Nicosia General Hospital, project which is a monument to official incompetence – its completion years behind schedule because of the abysmally poor planning. These are the planners who forgot to tell the architects about a car-park, who remembered half-way through the project that no provision had been made in plans for a specific clinic and who approved wards, which were not big enough to house the necessary equipment, leading to the demolition of walls and redesigning. Need we mention the fact that the hospital premises are sprawled across a huge expanse, instead of being housed in a tall building that makes access from one department to the other through lifts much easier?
With such a record of incompetence, is it any wonder that the Cancer Patients and Friends Committee is fighting the Health Ministry’s plans? Even the decision to have a flagship general hospital without an oncology centre is deeply flawed and contrary to the practice followed in the majority of European countries, which have such centres within big hospitals. This is because cancer patients often suffer complications that require care from other medical specialisations, which are not available at the bank’s oncology centre.
When patients suffer complications that cannot be treated at the bank’s centre they will have to be driven to the general hospital for care! This is happening in reverse at present with hospital patients being taken to the bank’s centre by ambulance for radiotherapy (because the government refuses to fix the equipment at the hospital) and then back to their wards. Surely cancer patients do not need additional inconvenience on top of their suffering, but it seems such consideration do not enter the planning process of the Health Ministry’s policy-makers.
The committee, unlike the ministry, has the best interests of cancer patients at heart, and it has studied the implication of the decision more thoroughly than the policy makers. It is therefore absolutely right to fight to reverse this absurd decision.
