Reliable health services are key to regional development, Adonis Georgiades said tonight, via a taped intervention at the Regional Growth Conference 2026. “No one will go and live in a region where they will work when they know that there are no reliable health services in that region,” the Health Minister said, adding that this is exactly why “we have given enough money from the recovery fund to upgrade the region’s hospitals.”
As Georgiades said, on a second level, medical tourism could become a driver of economic growth in the region. He referred to the silver economy, which is the economy generated by the health services provided to those who retire in northwestern European countries and choose to live in the country. In fact, he explained that “if there is specialisation in health services such as anti-ageing or healthy ageing in a nice environment, which most regional cities in the country have, then we will really be talking about the development of the region in one of the promising areas of health today.” Ideally, the health minister said, the priority for health would be to build innovative services in every regional hospital, which would act as an attraction for people from outside the country. Asked about public-private sector cooperation in all this, the health minister said that it goes without saying that cooperation between the two sectors in the health sector is self-evident, adding that in big cities, health services are not comparable to those provided in the big hospitals in the centre, but they are reliable and very close to those offered by the hospitals in Athens.
