Patients struggling to find personal doctor in Attica

Patients in Attica, Greece’s most populous region, are struggling to find or book an appointment with their personal doctor, a new institution introduced by the government this summer.

The system, which will be fully deployed from the new year, provides for a single doctor to constantly monitor a patient, record and update his/her medical history, direct them to other specialists, prescribe medicines and suggest appropriate treatments.

A month and a half into the implementation of the new system and the lack of doctors in Attica remains a serious problem. By the middle of last week, 4,540,000 Greek citizens had registered with 3,333 personal doctors.

In Attica, personal doctors currently cover only 50% of the population over 16 years old. Two in three personal doctors are general practitioners and pathologists employed in the National Health System who automatically joined the new system, without being able to refuse.

Pavlos Slavounos, general physician at the Vari Health Center, updated the electronic appointment scheduling system on October 25 for all his available appointments for November. “Everything was booked on the same day,” he tells Kathimerini. “This creates a problem when you have told a patient to do some tests and you want to see the results.”