ATHENS – Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis said 165 more nurses are being added to the Greek capital’s major Evangelismos Hospital after continued complaints about a shortage of staff, including at other hospitals.

He attended a swearing-in ceremony for 35 nurses and said that came after 73 others had already been hired after the government vowed to add 10,000 positions to the health care sector where hospitals even have shortages of toilet paper.

“This strengthens the hospital staff in practical ways so that we may be able to use more surgeries and better serve our patients in all departments and during hospital on-call days” he said of the hirings.

Greek hospitals do not accept patients 24 hours a day or offer services around the clock, instead designating on-duty hospitals to which people must travel, resulting in emergency waiting rooms so overcrowded that fights have broken out.

Georgiadis, who while serving as Health Minister in a previous government wanted to charge patients a hospital entry fee, said he also spoke with staff and patients but didn’t reveal what he was told.

“My main goal during my appointment is to reduce the waiting time when the hospital is on call as much as possible, with improved and faster care for patients, and to strengthen infrastructure,” Georgiadis said, noting that upgrade work on Evangelismos’ emergency-care departments will start immediately.

“The goal in the coming months is to have a better National Health System at all levels – and we will succeed,” he said, reported the state’s Athens-Macedonia News Agency, but he didn’t say what would happen at other hospitals.

In January, he also squeezed hospital staff to do more before the hiring began and said that even while understaffed and without some key equipment they had to stick to their budgets and find ways to reduce waiting times.

Despite Greece’s resurging economy, which has benefited from European Union Recovery Funds, and the shortage of doctors, hospitals must still manage costs effectively, he said at the time.

“These budgets, which have been based on your actual expenditures from the previous year, must be adhered to, and the responsibility rests with you. We will be closely monitoring the situation. Administrations that consistently fall short of the budget will not continue,” he said then.

The 2024 hospital budget was 2.9 billion euros ($3.21 billion) which is only a fraction of the more than 20 billion euros ($22.16 billion) generated by tourism alone, a sector the government is promoting for Greece’s economic growth.

In April, the government said that the introduction of afternoon paid surgical procedures at state hospitals had worked and would shrink the huge patient waiting lists for critical operations.

National Health System unions, who oppose the measure, said paid surgeries did little to reduce the waiting lists and that the number of patients then awaiting surgery was more than 102,000. They want more doctors and surgical nurses hired.