ATHENS — Fotini Katsigianni wears a white nurse’s hat that protrudes prominently from the top of her head. She is head nurse at Evangelismos Hospital, one of the city’s most prominent.
So she was surprised last month when she was approached by a man in the hospital’s hallway. At the time, Ms. Katsigianni’s husband was a patient there. The strange man extended an arm with a business card and averted his face, so she could not identify him. He offered to rent her a cut-rate nurse.
“He told me for 30 euros I could have whatever I want!” Ms. Katsigianni said, laughing at the idea of the head nurse being solicited to buy illegal nursing care.
First the men come to the hospitals of Greece during visiting hours, leaving business cards with pictures of nurses under pillows and in waiting rooms. Then the women come at night, mostly foreigners from countries like Georgia, Romania and Bulgaria. They are the nurses of Greece who aren’t really nurses.
Greece’s dire finances have gutted its health care system. Universal coverage effectively ended under the austerity measures imposed under the terms of the country’s bailout. Budget cuts have also thinned the ranks of hospital staff nurses, who are supposed to handle medical tasks like changing IVs.
Now, when patients come to a hospital in Greece, they increasingly have to hire their own nurses just to receive basic care. While private nurses have long been a feature of Greek health care, the country’s wrenching economic crisis has left many patients with neither the money nor the insurance coverage to hire licensed caregivers.
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“We’ve earned this,” she said of her job. “We’ve studied and we’ve sat in classrooms.”
Dr. Miltiadis Papastamatiou, Sotiria’s chief executive, said retired nurses were often not replaced, “and that’s led to the needs of both patients and staff not being adequately met,” though he downplayed the extent of the problem at Sotiria.
But a staff nurse there, who would not give her name for fear of losing her job, acknowledged the severity of the issue.
“We know what’s going on,” she shrugged. “Everybody knows.”
Aggelos Petropoulos contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on February 8, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Greek Austerity Spawns Fakery: Playing Nurse. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
