New Incident Management Best Practices COVID-19 inside hospitals with the active participation of private hospitals, which are now required to keep their COVID-19 patients rather than refer them to YOU as has been done so far, published by the Ministry of Health.

According to a circular signed by Secretary General of the Health Service Yiannis Kotsiopulos, the operation of Covid clinics in public hospitals continues, while private nursing facilities may also have Covid clinics. Covid clinics only admit patients with symptoms and scientific evidence of the disease who need hospitalization and special treatment.

Patients who are hospitalized or are in the hospitalization stage in non-COVID clinics and who have tested positive for the virus during a routine or random laboratory test, undergo a clinical and laboratory examination by a specialist doctor (infectious disease specialist, pathologist or pulmonologist). ), and if they are asymptomatic or have a very mild illness and do not need special treatment, they can stay in their clinic in a special isolation room that will be allocated for this purpose. Exceptions are hematology clinics and departments for transplantation of solid organs or primary hematopoietic cells, which are not allowed to hospitalize patients who test positive for coronavirus. Another exception concerns patients admitted to psychiatric and child psychiatric dispensaries of general hospitals whose mental health condition does not allow for isolation. These patients will be treated in Covid clinics.

In the event that regular surgery is scheduled and the patient tests positive for coronavirus, the surgery is rescheduled and the patient returns home following EODY instructions. Emergency surgery for patients who test positive is not postponed, but is carried out according to the protocols of the Committee for Nosocomial Infections of each hospital. Patients who require hospitalization in an intensive care unit and who test positive for SARS-CoV-2 are transferred to the National Health Service’s Intensive Care Unit – Covid.

According to the Ministry of Health, this reorganization of facilities, equipment and human resources is being done to “better serve non-COVID cases and provide comprehensive care for COVID-19 patients.” The data that allows for a partial return to hospital normality are the vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 of a large percentage of the population, the prevalence of milder variants of the virus, and the availability of treatment (antiviral drugs, monoclonal antibodies).