Our View: Health minister’s job should be to help Okypy not embarrass it

It was surprising to see how the new health minister, Michalis Hadjipantelas, decided to deal with the delays by the state health services (Okypy) in carrying out projects and improvement works at the public hospitals, all of which are under its authority. The minister had a letter he had sent to Okypy, listing all the planned projects for 2020-2021 about which nothing had been done, published in Politis.

“Despite almost being in the month of September, not only has no project been implemented, but neither has the planning nor the implementation procedures been set in motion,” said Hadjipantelas in his scathing letter in which he listed all the development projects that were pending – five in the Nicosia district, four in the Larnaca/Famagusta district and one in Limassol. These projects totalled some €34 million, he said.

It was a very peculiar way chosen by the minister, who has been in his post for just a few months, to reprimand the Okypy board and its CEO. If he is correct in his accusations, a big share of the responsibility for the failure to pursue the development projects belongs to the government which appointed them. Why had these people been appointed if they are incapable of planning and implementing any project approved by the government and why are they still in their posts?

Is it a case of abject incompetence or could it be that Okypy might not have the resources and know-how to execute the projects decided by the government? And why had the minister felt obliged to publicly humiliate the people the government appointed to run Okypy, when any complaints could have been taken up privately. This would have been a more professional approach, which is what Hadjipantelas will be doing now. On Monday it was announced he would be meeting the Okypy management, with whom cooperation was excellent, later in the week to discuss timeframes.

Does a minister publicly humiliate a state organisation’s management, presenting it as incompetent and then claiming he has excellent cooperation with it? Perhaps this was down to his inexperience, but the more sensible approach would have been to explore the reasons for Okypy’s failure to execute the projects approved by the government and take the necessary action. If it was down to incompetence, the board and top management should have been sacked; if it was because of understaffing more people should have been hired or projects assigned to the overstaffed health ministry.

That Okypy is not performing its duties very effectively is well-documented, but the job of the health minister should be to help the service find solutions and not to publicly embarrass it.