Abandoned by the state, community weaves its own safety net

by Pavlos Zafiropoulos

“I never wanted to open a community health clinic,” Ilias Tsolakidis, a founding member of a team of volunteers in the northern Greek prefecture of Pieria, told TPPi in a recent interview. “It is a form of protest. There should be no need for them, it is the state’s responsibility to provide medical care for all of its citizens. I consider it a necessary evil.”

Or a necessary good one might say, because the volunteers in and around the northern town of Katerini (population 85,850) have undeniably done a lot to support residents in the area hit hard by the crisis. Amidst other initiatives, such as setting up ‘no middlemen’ markets giving families access to low cost farmer’s produce, in early December the group established a community health clinic offering free health services and medicines to needy residents.

With few financial resources at their disposal, the volunteers turned to another source for the pharmaceuticals required by the clinics patients: the medicines collecting dust in countless medicine cabinets around the country (for instance new or partially opened boxes of pills that are no longer required). To date the clinic has already collected 5,200 packages of pharmaceuticals from donations. And to allow patients to see at the click of a mouse what medicines are available from the clinic, Mr Tsolakis himself coded an internet app directly linked to the clinic’s pharmacy. All one has to do is search for the brand name or active ingredient of a drug and a results page appears showing what packages are in stock and their expiration dates.

“It was very a simple application to code,” Mr Tsolakidis said. “Yet it is something that the National Health System has never been able to do. Every hospital has a pharmacy but they don’t have a system like this and drugs go to waste. That is why I am angry, not at the various health ministers who don’t know any better, but at their highly paid advisers. Could they never have thought of doing this?”

The clinic stocks a wide range of medicines, all donated, from simple antibiotics to more expensive treatments. Mr Tsolakidis described the case of a mother who attends the clinic to procure the drug Humira for the treatment of her son’s Crohn’s disease. Each 40mg injection costs over 500 euros on the market. The clinic currently had six.

Mr Tsolakidis’s system may be simple but it effectively collects and handles useful information both when pharmaceuticals are donated and when they are given to patients. This also allows the volunteers to counter criticisms that the clinic’s system of redistributing medicines is dangerous, which Mr Tsolakidis describes as baseless. “All drugs donated to the clinic are checked by a professional pharmacist and are only given out with a doctor’s prescription.”

All of this data will in turn be used to monitor the clinic’s activity. “Our aim isn’t to describe the effects of the crisis but to record them. In six months we plan to issue a report demonstrating the number of people that have been forced to use our services because they have nowhere else to turn. To show the minister that the bloodletting needs to end.”

The drugs are not only available to residents of Katerini, but to anyone in the country. On receiving a request for drugs from any other community clinic in the country the clinic will package and ship them for free via the national coach service (KTEL). “The people of KTEL kindly offered to ship whatever packages we need to send at no cost.”

When asked whether he was concerned that offering drugs effectively to people throughout the country might rapidly deplete the clinic’s stores, Mr Tsolakidis said he was not worried, having been humbled by the level of support the clinic had received. Overall the clinic has 79 doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists and other professionals willing to treat patients for free. And boxes of pharmaceuticals keep arriving both from Greeks and from abroad, namely from Germans wishing to show their support.

“What we have experienced, seeing this, it gives me great strength and confidence that we as a people will find our way. Because we have enormous reserves of solidarity. If someone leads the way then others will follow with great energy.”

Most of all, however, the volunteers of Pieria want one thing: for their clinic to close because it is no longer needed.   

Below is the text from the Community Clinic of Katerini requesting donations of pharmaceuticals from http://www.kikaf.org/:

In order to help out these people who are suffering we have started to collect medication (which may have been opened but never used or a portion remains in sealed form) and are making it available through the Community Clinic/Pharmacy of Katerini, which has been open for more than a month now with the support of 61 volunteer health workers from our small city.

Dear friends and fellow European citizens, we call on you to take part in our Pan-European effort to gather together drugs for this cause, which was initiated by friends of our volunteer group abroad.
We are not asking for money. We ask only that you send us opened/unused medication which you have in your medicine cabinets, those which you no longer require and which will eventually expire and get thrown away.

Gather together whatever you and your friends/family have to offer, wrap them all up in a small package and send them to the following address:

Social Medical Care/Pharmacy of Katerini
Koinoniko Iatreio/Farmakeio Katerinis Fleming 8 (Kapnikos Stathmos)
60100 Katerini
http://www.kikaf.org

Click here to print the address label
With our thanks,
Voluntary Action Group of Pieria
www.otoposmou.gr & [email protected]