“In the NHS I do not tolerate the fakelaki (bribe). I have set up a platform so that patients can automatically file a complaint if someone asked them for one, and I declare that as long as I am Health Minister, no such case will ever be tolerated,” said Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis in an interview today on radio station SKAI 100.3.

Referring to the arrest of a doctor at Hippocrateio hospital on charges of bribery, he said that the hospital administration immediately suspended the doctor. “This is an administrative measure, whether he is guilty or innocent will be decided by the court,” the Minister stressed, also referring to his own post where he essentially announced the hospital’s decision.

“I posted yesterday afternoon the decision of Hippocrateio’s administration that the doctor was suspended. And then Ms. Elena Akrita of SYRIZA comes out and officially accuses me in her own post that ‘our decision to suspend the doctor violates the presumption of innocence and is unacceptable.’ So, SYRIZA is asking for the doctor to go back and operate in the hospital and keep taking fakelakia until the trial is over? Is this SYRIZA’s official stance on the fakelaki?” he asked.

“The fakelaki has no place in the NHS. I fight it, I abhor it, I loathe it. Fakelaki means extorting money from people for a service that the NHS provides for free. And that I absolutely do not want,” continued the Minister of Health, adding: “In response to doctors who say ‘the money we earn is too little,’ I’ve given them the right to practice private work in parallel, so that if a doctor wants to make more money, he can go in the afternoon, operate in a private hospital, and earn more legally, and taxed.”

When asked if “everything runs like clockwork” in the NHS, Mr. Georgiadis said: “In a National Health System with 127 hospitals, 368 health centers and 1,500 regional clinics handling 85,000 cases a day—25 million a year—I am not foolish enough to believe that ‘everything runs like clockwork’ and that no one suffers anywhere. But what I do believe is that the system’s progress is evident.”

As he noted, if ten years ago, out of 85,000 daily cases, 15,000 involved suffering, now it is 5,000, and if this continues, it will be 1,000.

“Unfortunately, someone will always suffer. We must learn to defend the NHS. I don’t say we should defend the NHS in order to hide its problems. I’m the first one to go ‘on camera’ in hospitals and talk about the problems. It’s one thing to talk about the NHS’s problems, which we want to solve, and another to spend all day undermining our trust in the system. The system works, and we have one of the best systems in Europe,” he concluded.