Corfu Hospital Psychiatric Department employees to hold 4-hour work stoppage

The employees of the Corfu Hospital Psychiatric Department are reacting to the Ministry of Health's bill on mental health and demand its withdrawal.

The Psychiatric Department Employees' Union will hold a 4-hour work stoppage from 11:00 to 15:00 and will gather at the hospital entrance at 12:00. The Union is also calling for a General Assembly at 13:30 in the hospital amphitheatre.

The Union's statement:

With the new mental health bill expected to be submitted, the psychiatric departments of hospitals and the psychiatric hospitals will lose their current legal form and will be administratively transferred to the Health Regions. A large, technocratically centralised organisation will be created, which will accumulate psychiatric clinics, mental health centres, NGOs and private psychiatric clinics. The employees who currently work in the psychiatric departments of General Hospitals, primary health care units and structures will be transferred to the Organisation of Health Regions, while the hospital administrations within which the psychiatric departments operate will have no competence in their management and operation.

With this administrative reform, the mental health services provided by the General Hospitals to date are being deregulated and downgraded.

The great shortages and the deterioration of the health centres belonging to the Health Regions are well known. The administrative transfer of all mental health structures to the Health Regions can only create dysfunctions and chronic problems across the whole spectrum of the operation of mental health services given the need to create an administrative and support mechanism from scratch and the fact that they will be managed remotely.

In addition, the accumulation of public mental health services, NGOs and private structures in a single body that will be managed by it through the Health Regions, paves the way for the profitable operation of the units and the employees will likely suffer wage losses from the transfer to the Health Regions.

It is absurd that employees and services with only a wall separating them in the hospital have to go to different bodies and services hundreds of kilometres away to resolve basic issues.

At the same time, it is a big blow to the rehabilitation programmes, which will be merged into a single Private Law Organisation. For the first time in the National Health System, units are being detached from hospitals and put into private law units, with employees having reduced labour rights. The administrative and accounting unification of all approved organisations and public rehabilitation programmes will bring about adverse changes in the organisation and philosophy of these programmes, limiting treatment options and gradually shrinking them. All organisations and all public programmes dealing with rehabilitation are in danger of losing their identity, their history and their therapeutic methods after decades of social service.

We call on the employees, the unions, the families of people with mental disorders, the mass organisations in the field of mental health and rehabilitation not to allow the developments planned by the government and to demand high quality public mental health and rehabilitation services based on the modern achievements of science to fully meet the modern needs of the people.

CORFU HOSPITAL PSYCHIATRIC DEPARTMENT EMPLOYEES' UNION

Photo: The Union President Tasos Papatsoris