The full statement:
The serious gaps in staffing and infrastructure at Corinth General Hospital became tragically clear this week. A 19-year-old volunteer assisting refugees at the local camp was rushed to the local hospital after collapsing. Doctors found she had a brain haemorrhage. But the hospital did not have the specialists needed to treat her, including a neurosurgeon. The transfer to Tzaneio Hospital in Piraeus, Athens, ultimately took five hours. The young woman didn’t make it.
The KKE’s Corinth Regional Committee expresses its deepest condolences to her family and loved ones.
This tragedy adds to a long list of similar incidents already familiar to the people of Corinthia. The dismantling of public hospitals and the commercialisation of healthcare – a policy consistently pursued by the current New Democracy government and its predecessors – have left local residents fearing for their very lives.
Successive governments and the European Union have treated health as a cost and a field of profit for private clinic owners, rendering the public health system unable to meet even basic needs in the region. Corinth General Hospital is dangerously understaffed, lacks key specialisations, and operates with underpaid workers under exhausting and unsafe conditions. These workers, despite everything, continue to serve with dedication, resisting the relentless degradation of the National Health System. And all this while vast sums are channelled into the war economy and military ventures.
We call on the people of Corinth to take the struggle for health into their own hands. We cannot accept that in 2025 we still lack access to quality care and preventive services – that we are forced to fear for the lives and health of our families. This is happening in a region where workplace accidents happen on a daily basis.
Only the collective struggle of the people can confront the brutality of a system that deems human life expendable. The only realistic solution is our proposal for an organised, fully staffed, and equipped public health system – exclusively public, free of charge, and free from any form of business activity.
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