PEOPLE attending the opening of a community centre in Amiandos village in the mountains last Friday, were treated to another bad-tempered presidential outburst. This time, however, the target of President Anastasiades’ public outburst was not foreign diplomats, as had been the case in the past, but the top brass of the health ministry, from the minister down.
He accused them of misleading him with regard to staff shortages in state hospitals, which the union of government doctors PASYKI had been protesting about all week. Once PASYKI started giving details of how the shortages were affecting different departments and the political parties joined in the debate, Anastasiades felt obliged to respond.
It was not the kind of response expected from the president, who, in effect, publicly questioned the competence of his minister by openly suggesting that Giorgos Pamborides was at best being misled by the top officials at the ministry about staffing levels at the hospitals. The other interpretation that could be made was that Pamborides himself had been misleading the president.
Either way, it does not reflect well on the government, when the president publicly passes responsibility on to his minister. He may have had a point, but the matter should have been dealt with in private. The under-secretary to the president had written to the minister requesting information about the situation in hospitals, so why had Anastasides lashed out before he had received a response, without giving his minister the chance to explain the situation?
Matters were made worse by the president’s subsequent announcement that he would undertake an initiative on the national health scheme, meeting with stakeholders (doctors and nursing unions) and then with political parties in order to establish a roadmap for implementation. This was a vote of no confidence in the health minister, whom the president evidently does not trust to do the job he appointed him for – setting up the national health scheme as well as ensuring the smooth running of the public health sector.
But is Pamborides to blame for the situation? His predecessor stepped down because the doctors’ union was blocking everything he tried to do regarding the national health scheme and he did not have the support of the president who sided with the union. And now, Anastasiades will probably call in representatives of the union that has been at loggerheads with his minister and try to reassure them that their privileges would not be affected by the national health scheme. He has done this before with the troublesome government doctors without securing their co-operation as we all know.
The president may be presenting himself as the man who will save the day, but the reason we have all these problems at hospitals is because his government is in a quandary over how to proceed with the national health. And the responsibility for this lack of leadership does not belong to the health minister, but to the president who is terrified of confronting the government doctors.
