ATHENS –  Dismissing complaints from rival parties, Greece’s Parliament – with a New Democracy government majority – passed a mental health revision package that will see facilities overseen by regional units.

It was adopted on a vote of 159-138 and would allow the conscription of private doctors for public hospitals over their objections and could see those refusing being barred from the health system’s electronic prescription system, shutting them off.

During a debate in Parliament, Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis said that no mental health facility would shut down and no employee laid off, but would be incorporated in the new planning for health regions as would those working in addiction rehabilitation units, said the Athens-Macedonia News Agency AMNA.

He also noted that the prevention centers are not related to the draft bill but, being private organizations, they are funded through a memorandum of collaboration with the Ministry of Health that ends in 2027.

Georgiadis also asserted that the rehabilitation centers of 18 Ano and KETHEA will not be shut down. Drug-assisted rehabilitation is not subsidized or favored, he said, and a unified agency will observe all programs, with the addiction patient deciding the program they prefer for rehabilitation.

There will be no layoffs at these centers, while the bill will follow the European Union directives for psychiatric reform, he said, undercutting some of the criticisms directed at the measures by opponents.

“We should not see the NHS (National Health System)  as consisting of only public facilities, but of all health facilities in Greece that will be incorporated in a unified health map, and to know where everyone can contribute and to what extent, to have the best possible health services under current circumstances,” he said.

The 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 government.

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.

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.