Filenews 2 June 2021 - byMarlena Panagi
No more suffering for tens of thousands of patients who, every day, struggle with phone lines and their hundreds of missed calls to the various departments of public hospitals.
The Organization of State Health Services, has launched through its upgraded website, an appointment arranging service to doctors or other health professionals electronically and several citizens have already been served. At present, this service is done through an officer who has been appointed and works in each of the public hospitals individually.
Specifically and in accordance with the procedure followed and already used by several patients, the citizen through the website submits a request for the specialty, doctor or other health professional, and the hospital from which he would like to be served.
During a period of not more than two hours, the competent officer contacts him by telephone and the appointment is arranged. As we are informed, the citizens who have used this service of the OKY in the past few days, managed to secure their appointment in the space of only a few minutes, while some of them had previously spent several hours waiting on the headset, since their telephone calls to the competent clinics/specialties of the hospitals did not receive any response.
The procedure is the same and concerns all doctors of all medical specialties of the OKYY and all the services provided by the Agency. This means that the patient is entitled through the online service to arrange his appointment for physiotherapy, diagnostic and other examinations, etc.
As the Director-General of the OKYY, Christos Loizidis, stated in a statement to "F", "it will soon be possible for patients to arrange appointments directly online, without the intervention of another person".
The operation of this service, said Mr. Loizidis, "is a sample of the effort we are making to upgrade our Agency and our hospitals and what we aimed for was to allow our patients through our website "to get to know doctors and other health professionals, make their choice and proceed to arrange appointments in a much easier way and with far less hassle than 'what's before'.
Regarding the Agency's new website, Mr Loizidis said that in it, "citizens can be informed about all the services offered by the Agency. It is a "customer-centric" website and that was our goal from the beginning. To serve citizens in a timely and correct manner."
