Pharmacists at the Limassol general hospital on Monday called an immediate strike over changes to the hospital’s pharmaceuticals department’s management structure.
The strike was called by the pharmacists’ branch of trade union Isotita and will last for 48 hours.
The union said state health services (Okypy) had given more power to the hospital’s executive director and that this violated the relevant laws regarding how hospitals’ management structures are formed.
However, Okypy insist that the changes are legal and that the union is acting with the hope of creating a new “senior pharmacist” roles within the hospital, allowing those holding the title to be paid on the A13 scale and thus earn as much as €73,228 per year.
Isotita’s pharmacists’ branch chairwoman Evgenia Efstathiou was less than convinced, however, telling the Cyprus News Agency (CNA) the decision had been made instead of hiring a head pharmacist, as the union had wished.
“We have been waiting for four months regarding the matter of the absence of a head pharmacist, and then unfortunately, at lunchtime last Thursday, the pharmacy staff were informed by the executive director that there would be many changes regarding the rules and duties of each pharmacist,” she said.
She added that the executive director had “appointed himself in charge of pharmacists”, and that this “is completely against the law, as the organisation and management of a hospital’s pharmacy is carried out exclusively by the head pharmacist as a requirement of the law”.
“The service plan so, as has been approved by parliament. You can’t just arbitrarily get involved with the operations of a hospital’s pharmacy. This is a specialised, scientific area, and only a pharmacist is competent to make such decisions,” she said.
She stressed that while it can be necessary to change the definition of some people’s roles, “it makes no sense to suddenly change everyone’s role and shuffle the deck and throw away whatever is done, without justification and without the authority to do so.”
She went on to say that in the absence of a head pharmacist, “the pharmacy was operating marginally, trying to follow procedures as safely as possible at a time when there was no one there to make the serious decisions.”
“We have been lucky so far that no incident occurred,” she added.
“Our union is not asking for anything but the obvious; the application of the law, which is very clear – that the organisation and operation of the pharmacy is the responsibility of the head pharmacist, and that person cannot be someone who is not a pharmacist.”
Okypy spokesman Charalambos Charilaou insisted that no law had been violated in the pharmacy’s reshuffle, and said the striking Isotita members “should read the law”.
“The executive director has every right to take the actions he has. If the union’s opinion is that the executive director has no authority, we can imagine what will happen across the board if anyone can claim their manager or management team or even the human resources department has no right regarding the organisation and management of various departments,” he said.
He added, “it is like abolishing directorates and leaving them as self-governing little kingdoms, which goes against the whole philosophy of management does while at the same time driving up costs because then we will have to create new senior positions like the ones they have asked for.”
Additionally, he said, Okypy has offered pharmacists on the A12 payscale, earning up to €66,360 per year, to take on the duties of running hospitals’ pharmacies, but “unfortunately they all refused”.
He added that the Limassol general hospital’s pharmacy’s operations have “not been particularly affected” by the strike thus far.
