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Surgeons who prescribe expensive drugs will be punished through three months' suspension from operating rooms. The same applies to doctors who take bribes.

Doctors who steal will be dismissed, said briefly the Minister of Health Andreas Loverdos during his yesterday meeting with hospital managers. His order is more than clear: "If you know there is something wrong with some doctors you must remove them immediately. We do not need proof, just instructions, the manager to remove a surgeon from the operating room for three months. The same will apply to those who take bribes, those who prescribe more drugs than necessary or order large quantities of drugs that are not necessary."

Mr. Loverdos said that there is no time and everyone should take actions. The managers acknowledged that hospitals have large expenses - particularly pharmaceutical costs and payments for drugs, but they also said that they would save money. The manager of Atikon Hospital Mr. Ilias Lambiris said that this is the most problematic hospital because "the staff is not accounting to anyone". The doctors in this hospital are university doctors and he is not entitled to ask them to account, he said.  

Sotiria Hospital also made large expenses for medicines and examinations, said its manager Yiannis Stefanou. He confessed that there are 700 beds in the hospital but the CT is outdated and the hospital pays € 250,000 annually for the axis CT in private clinics.

The manager of St. Olga Hospital Mr. Vassilis Kanelopoulos has found cases of impudent spending. After his intervention the costs in the last months fell. “A doctor from the hospital presented a bill for 27,000 euros for vascular grafts of a patient. I rejected his request and he came after two days with medicines worth 15,000 euros for the same patient. The same doctor was hanging out around the hospital shop turgidly stating that he charged each patient the same amount.”

Accusations were brought against 35 orthopedic surgeons from Greek hospitals, which are presumed to have taken bribes from companies to use their products at fancy prices.

The Secretary General at the Ministry Nikos Polizos required the hospital managers to immediately implement their obligations: to invite tenders for deliveries to October 1, to pay the amount of € 250 million to suppliers that is due for the period 2005-2006, to make the hospitals work full time, to draw up the budgets, to organize the bureaucratic machine and complete the new contracts with the hospital staff. According to Mr. Polizos, costs fell in total between 5% and 6% for all hospitals and the cost for medicines and drugs have fallen between 15% and 20%.

The Secretary of the Ministry asked the hospital managers to increase the consumption of drugs that substitute the original ones and that are cheaper. "Only 10% of drug substitutes are used in Greece while in the U.S., which is the center of medical research, this percentage is 38," he said.

The manager of the Sisamnoglio Hospital Olga Ikonomou said that the cost of medicines in the hospital have decreased by 50% during the first six months of the year because many of the drugs used were substitutes. Soon the hospital will launch a pilot program for prescribing only substitutes of original drugs.

The managers complained that the buildings and their installations are out-of-date and some of them said that the plaster of the ceilings have blistered and started to fall on the patients’ beds.