Our View: Paying the price of a shabby vendetta

IN THE PREVIOUS three years the state has spent €106 million sending patients abroad for medical treatment. For many cases this was justified, as the required medical treatment could not be provided on the island, but in others it was not. There could be no justification, whatsoever, for example, in sending patients to Israel, the UK or Greece for open heart surgery, when this can be done at Cyprus’ private hospitals, at which standards of care and success rates are as high as anywhere in the world.
Yet the Christofias government and its Minister of Health Christos Patsalides have gone out of their way to prevent people from having heart surgery in Cyprus. In February 2009, the Council of Ministers amended the regulations governing the sending of patients abroad for treatment, making it possible for someone to go abroad even if he or she could be treated in Cyprus. The old regulations had made it compulsory to use the local health sector, if the required treatment was available.
The amendments introduced another astonishing provision. The final decision as to where a patient would be treated belonged to the health minister, ‘once he has heard the preference of the patient’. This provision, normally associated with totalitarian regimes, allows the minister to do as he pleases, while he is accountable to nobody; ministry officials were taken out of the equation. On what grounds is the health minister – usually a politician – qualified to decide which hospital a patient should be sent for treatment, without any restrictions placed on him?
Patsalides is the last member of the government who should have been given such powers, considering that ministerial objectivity is not his strong point. His ongoing war against the American Heart Institute (AHI), which performs heart surgery locally, was well-known to everyone but the president gave him additional powers for his onslaught, which continues. The minister has been avoiding sending patients to the Institute, because he has fallen out with one of its directors, sending them instead to Israeli hospitals via two private firms which take a cut of the hospital bill. It is very shabby business that no sensible minister would have wanted to be a part of, as private companies’ earnings are directly related to his personal decisions.
The minister had tried to defend his decisions not to send patients for heart surgery locally, by claiming private hospitals here charged more than those abroad. He has failed to provide any evidence to support this claim, but after a complaint by the AHI, the Auditor-general’s office said that the prices charged for operations by the Institute were the same as those of the Onasion Hospital in Greece. A few weeks ago, after it was reported that the Israeli hospitals’ charges were too high, Patsalides went to Tel Aviv, apparently to negotiate better prices. Ironically, the health ministry has not bothered to negotiate new rates with local hospitals, which still charge the rates agreed some 10 years ago.
If the state sent local private hospitals more patients, it would be able to negotiate better rates than it is being charged in the UK, Greece and Israel. But even if rates here were slightly higher there are other benefits. First, the patient and his family would not have the additional costs of air tickets and hotel accommodation abroad for weeks. Second, several millions of euros would stay in the Cyprus economy and contribute to the improvement of hospital standards. Most importantly, the patient would be better off psychologically, having treatment in his own country, in familiar surroundings with his friends and family close to him. And his doctor would be there for post-operation consultations.
All these factors do not seem to matter to Patsalides, who appears to have the government’s backing in his efforts to destroy the private health sector. He is currently in dispute with Paraskevaidion Kidney Transplant Centre and has decided to set up a rival Transplant Centre at the Nicosia General Hospital. Instead of supporting the new AHI, state-of-the-art hospital that has cost in the region €50 million – raised from private investors – and could bring patients to Cyprus from abroad he is sending patients abroad Yet a rational minister would have been fully backing projects that upgrade healthcare and could act as incentives for bringing top Cypriot medical professionals from abroad, to work on the island. But nobody would return to a place where the health minister is going out of its way to ensure private healthcare initiatives fail.
Ironically, on Thursday the Cyprus Tourism Organisation announced its plan to promote Cyprus as a medical tourism destination. But why would anyone come to Cyprus for medical treatment when the health minister has so little trust in our doctors and hospitals that he sends patients abroad for treatment they could receive here?

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.