EKAV: Over 15 intoxication calls a day

More than fifteen emergency calls per day for intoxication are received by EKAV in the Chersonisos and Malia area, according to statements by the chairman of EKAV employees in Crete, Nikos Kalogiannakis, on Crete Radio. On weekends, the number may exceed twenty calls. These are primarily young people, both Greeks and foreign visitors, who lose consciousness at parties and events and require immediate medical care. To cover these incidents, the service dedicates one ambulance every night exclusively to the area. These figures reflect an estimate from the union representation of employees and not official statistics from the service, which has not released corresponding data.

This deployment has a direct cost for the rest of the prefecture’s coverage. One ambulance that remains stationed in a nightlife zone is not available for traffic, cardiac, or other emergency incidents in the broader area. EKAV Crete faces parallel reduced vehicle fleet, traffic problems that lengthen response times during summer months, as well as building issues at its facilities. The Chersonisos-Malia area is approximately thirty kilometers from Heraklion, a distance that during summer months can be covered in significantly longer time due to traffic.

The standing request that employees reiterate is the establishment of a polyclinic in the Chersonisos-Malia zone. Such a facility could handle low-severity incidents on site, without requiring transport to Heraklion, decompressing both ambulances and emergency departments of city hospitals. The issue has been transferred to the 7th Regional Health Authority of Crete, without having received a response so far, according to what the employees’ chairman stated. Similar facilities already operate in other tourist destinations in the country, with financing combining state resources and local government participation.

Beyond emergencies, EKAV Crete performs special patient transfers, nephrology patients for hemodialysis and cancer patients for radiotherapy, reaching three hundred routes per day. These are scheduled transfers with steady frequency, which consume resources regardless of seasonal peaks. The discussion about adolescent intoxication in Crete has intensified this year, with a series of incidents resulting in hospitalization and arrests of establishment owners in Rethymno and Chania. More in the Chersonisos section. The 7th Regional Health Authority had not publicly responded to the request by Tuesday afternoon August 18.