Health Minister Michael Hadjipantela conveyed the praise of the doctors in Israel to their colleagues at both the Nicosia General Hospital and the Makareion Hospital, who treated the 4-year-old girl that had to go to Israel for treatment with a streptococcus infection.
Hajipantela said he was in Israel last Sunday on a private visit, and on that occasion he visited the four-year-old girl. He said that from the briefing he had on Sunday, her condition is stable and critical.
“At the meeting, the Director of the Intensive Care Unit in Israel who gave credit to our doctors, both at Nicosia General Hospital and Makareion Hospital, for dealing with a rare virus, which usually doesn’t give you time to react. In some children it allows only two hours and fortunately our doctors reacted correctly and the little girl is given another chance to improve her condition,” he said, thanking the doctors of the two hospitals for their response and the way they handled the rare, as he said, incident.
On this occasion, he noted that “we need to look at the big picture of the emergency departments, to only go to them for very important cases, there are some of our fellow human beings, like this little child, who need immediate treatment, as well as others who have had an accident, so let us not go to them for no reason.” He added that doctors have proven that responding to serious incidents has “excellent results.”
Hadjipantela also announced that the Ministry of Health has moved to implement the decision to make strep tests available free of charge to paediatricians. The Minister urged people to come forward for free testing of children for streptococcus by their doctors and noted that a total of 8,500 tests were made available for this purpose.
With regard to the children’s emergency department, he said decisions were taken at a meeting at the Ministry on Monday, but said that he would announce the commencement of their operations in a few days.
Source: Cyprus News Agency