On Monday morning, October 7, nurses staged a 2-hour strike outside the general hospital in Nicosia. The reason was a recent attack by an unknown person with a knife on doctors and medical staff.
At the same time, a meeting is planned at the Presidential Palace to discuss this issue.
Nurses' unions and medical staff in the hospital's emergency department condemned the incident, which happened on Saturday and is being investigated as attempted murder. During the incident, a man who arrived for help pulled out a knife with which he tried to attack another patient and beat hospital staff, including a nurse.
The 29-year-old criminal, Christos Modesto, was detained by security forces and later released. The man is now wanted, two days later, for offenses of attempted murder, causing bodily harm with intent, making threats, assault causing bodily harm and possession and transport of an instrument.
A spokesman for the nurses' union told state broadcaster CyBC at the start of the strike that this latest incident was the last straw.
“This is not an isolated incident, and we demand that our employees can safely perform their duties,” the nurse said, noting that the main demand is more police presence in emergency rooms and giving officers powers to make arrests.
Nurses say one problem is that guards are currently only stationed at the entrances to a particular emergency department.
Dedicated security personnel have begun to decline in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a nursing spokesperson.
The representative of the National Health Service (Okypy), Charalambos Charilau, commenting on the incident, explained that hospitals have special security guards who are seconded by the police, and half of them work directly in the service.
“These officers patrol the hospital grounds because there are many other areas that need to be secured [besides the emergency department], such as laboratories and external surgical suites,” Harilau said.
The role of special officers is to be preventive and they do not have the power to make arrests, he confirmed. If reinforcements are needed, officers from the nearby Latsia Police Station are called.
President Nikos Christodoulides and Health Minister Michalis Damianos are expected to meet nurses' union general secretary Savvas Iakovou at 10:00 am to discuss the latest incident, as well as outstanding issues related to the nurses' collective agreement.
Meanwhile, Harilau said despite the strike, business was "going smoothly" at the general hospital and patient care had not been disrupted, while nursing unions said patients would only be admitted in the most urgent cases.
Source: cyprus-mail.com
