HEALTH Minister Frixos Savvides has postponed indefinitely the heart-to-heart talk he said he would hold this week with cardiologists from two competing heart clinics to settle a feud affecting the care provided to the island’s heart patients.
Savvides’ office did not give a reason for the postponement or set a new date for the meeting, saying only that Savvides would be leaving on Thursday for "a couple days in Athens."
Last year, the government sent 441 Cypriots overseas for open-heart surgery. While 1999 data are supposed to be released this week, the Health Ministry said that overseas heart repair cost Cyprus taxpayers £3,669,000 in 1998 and £2,949,00 in 1997.
But with a top-flight heart clinic — the American Heart Institute – operating at the Apollonion Hospital in Nicosia for the last 11 months, much of that tax-paid travel and treatment was a waste.
American Heart Institute doctors and nurses are all US trained and use the latest US heart-treatment equipment. They can even do heart-transplants, its chief cardiologist, Dr Christos Christou, said.
But he claimed his Institute had had to drum up its own business because Nicosia General Hospital cardiologists, headed by Dr Costakis Zambartas, have refused to honour a patient-referral agreement that Savvides brokered this past March.
Instead, Nicosia General cardiologists began working overtime, doing procedures their skills allowed, and referring overseas patients needing surgery they could not perform, Dr Christou said.
Zambartas has denied refusing to refer patients to the American Heart Institute. In fact, his boss, Nicosia General Hospital Director Dr Stavroulla Demetriou laid the blame for referring heart patients overseas with Savvides’ Heath Ministry.
In the three months since the Savvides-brokered March agreement, Dr Christou said he has had "12 to 14" patient referrals from Nicosia General Hospital, instead of the "40 to 50" he expected to have referred in that time.
In the first week of the agreement’s effect, he said he got no referrals at all, while Nicosia General Hospital said it treated three heart patients that week and sent 17 others overseas — at much higher cost than the American Heart Institute.
Dr Christou yesterday said Savvides had pledged Nicosia General cardiologists "would stop working overtime this week" and begin referring their extra patients to his Institute. "But I’ve heard this many times since January," he added.
Many private cardiologists say they prefer the American Heart Institute to services at Nicosia General Hospital.
They say their patients must wait sometimes months for procedures that can be scheduled in the morning and done the same afternoon at the American Heart Institute.
The feud has got back to Savvides, and last week he, too, was piqued: "After consultations I had with the doctors of the American Heart Institute, and the doctors from Nicosia General Hospital, I will get them all together sometime (this) week in my office," he pledged.
"And I will put down in writing," he continued, "the modus operandi of how they will operate and proceed in order to apply and stick to their agreement that this ministry has signed with this (American Heart Institute) clinic, that they (Nicosia General Hospital) will refer patients to them up to the maximum they can handle."
However, with this week’s meeting with Savvides postponed, it remains to be seen whether Nicosia General Hospital cardiologists cease their overtime work and begin the patient referrals to the American Heart Institute that Dr. Christou said Savvides pledged they would.
