Dear Minister Xanthos,
I write to you as a Greek Australian – I have a Greek passport and I was recently in Athens (4-12 January 2016) with my family for a holiday.
During our visit our young daughter (Zoe, aged five years old) fell ill with the gastro flu. The two events that followed appalled me as a Greek and worse still as a passionate foreigner in your country.
1. Wrong prescription of medicine. We called for a doctor to come to our hotel (a five-star hotel and one of the best hotels in Athens) to see our daughter. He was a good doctor but prescribed a medicine called Primperan to stop our child’s vomiting. A few hours after taking Primperan our child underwent a seizure and we had to rush her to the hospital (Παίδων Αγλαίας Κυριακού – Αριθμός Μητρώου 494883). On returning to Australia we were told that Primperan is banned for children under 10 years old as it stiffens their neck and face muscles and provides the appearance of the child having a seizure.
We were appalled that this medicine is still administered to children under 10 years old in Greece. It should be immediately banned.
2. The appalling state of your hospital – the process through which our child was diagnosed and treated in the hospital was shocking. While most of the doctors and nurses are doing the best they can, the infrastructure and facilities they have available to them, for being an EU country, is wrong. In our ward there was no privacy between beds (for example, a simple curtain between beds), no toilet paper in the bathrooms (we brought our own), the level of hygiene in the ward (and cleanliness) was appalling and there was a basic lack of process with NO nurse regular check-ups occurring of not only our child but anyone’s child in the ward. For heaven’s sake, there were not even enough thermometers available to nurses to test the children’s temperature. This type of health care for a country that is proud and strong is appalling and must be attended to as a matter of urgency.
The overall process from the time we were attended to at the emergency entrance, where our child had to wait two hours before even seeing a doctor (God knows what could have happened during this time), to our child not even being tagged on the hand or foot to ensure when the nurse did come around (very rare) that their statistics such as name and date of birth were clearly shown.
This lack of process is a real risk in children being stolen or lost as well as being mis-diagnosed. This whole process is wrong and should be fixed.
It does not take money to fix this but a strong government willing to take on the establishment and fix the basic healthcare process for young children.
Also the fact that the hospital did not know that Primperan can cause stiffness of the neck and face muscles of children under 10 years old is puzzling as this is well known by doctors in Australia, and Greece has a reputation of having some of the best doctors in the world.
Minister, I urge you to investigate and fix these basic and appalling issues in the children’s hospital system. I am available anytime to speak with you personally or with anyone in your department to tell you our story, which I dare say is relived everyday by local Greeks.