ATHENS – Measures to reform Greece’s mental health institutions, therapy centers and drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs brought protests from unions, doctors and rival parties to the ruling New Democracy.

Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis said the proposals that will go before Parliament – where the Conservatives have a majority and can pass any bill they want – are designed to fix problems in the widely-criticized system.

Greece’s largest public hospital workers’ union, the Panhellenic Medical Association, held a 24-hour work stoppage on July 29 and went into the streets to protest, complaining the bill will take authority away from local centers to regional units and lead to privatization.

The union said the problems in the system were due to “the abandonment of psychiatric reform and the underfunding and understaffing of mental health units,” and noting that there’s a severe shortage of staff.

PASOK-KINAL leader Nikos Androulakis said that psychiatric hospitals would lose their independence and come under the scrutiny of regional health departments and met with officials from the union.

He said that data from the European Union’s statistics agency Eurostat showed that, “The Greek people pay the second-highest private expenditures in Europe,” and complained about conscription of private doctors in public hospitals.

Most private doctors had refused calls to help, leading Georgiadis to say they would be forced to take shifts or be barred from using the electronic prescription system, effectively barring them from practicing without access to pharmacies.

“Instead, then, of the government taking initiatives to revive the National Health Service (NHS), it has resorted to blackmail. But by blackmailing the private doctors over electronic prescriptions, it is like blackmailing patients,” he said.

Androulakis proposed “doctors with permanent positions, a new health map, and a serious utilization of the Recovery Fund,” to make the system more competitive, the state-run Athens-Macedonia News Agency AMNA said.

Union President Athanasios Exadaktylos said the provisions related to electronic prescription access “will poison the necessary collaborative relationship for the upgrade of the public health system.”

SYRIZA Member of Parliament Andreas Panagiotopoulos, the party’s rapporteur,

Said that the penalties for private doctors who refuse to take on emergency shifts would “harm patients, especially vulnerable social groups and lower-income brackets, and said it was unconstitutional.

He called on the government to withdraw the article, calling it “unreasonable, unconstitutional and a violation of medical ethics, which offends the scientific community of the country,” as well.