vulnerability assessment only following UNHCR’s or other organizations’ intervention.87 Yet instead of improving, in the summer of 2017 (June) the situation further deteriorated. Up to that point (end of May 2017), primary healthcare services in the RICs were provided by NGOs (e.g. MdM), which, following the non-renewal of their contracts gradually started handing-over this activity to the state. As a result of this transition, which even at the time lacked sufficient planning, a huge gap was created in terms of both vulnerability assessment and the overall provision of healthcare services in the RICs.88 To illustrate the extent of the problem, in July 2017, the RIC at Moria, Lesvos, was left with 2 doctors (one full-time, the other, part-time), 1 psychologist and 1 social worker, competent for conducting vulnerability assessments for a population at the time amounting to some 4,000 asylum seekers. 89 The RIC of Kos, on the other hand, throughout most of August was left with no official medical personnel, whatsoever,90 meaning that no vulnerability assessment could take place. In turn, this led to a quasilandslide effect, by not only actively endangering persons in need of immediate assistance, but also creating significant delays in the examination of their asylum applications, as the GAS –and rightly so– would not register their asylum claims if they had not previously undergone a medical assessment. In this context, prevalent gaps in the reception of asylum seekers only served to detrimentally affect what best practices may had been in place, as their cumulative, ultimate, effect, was the further entrapment of vulnerable persons on the islands. The situation started somewhat ameliorating towards the end of August 2017, when personnel employed through KEELPNO (Hellenic Center for Disease Control & Prevention) was gradually deployed on the islands, thus inaugurating the state’s belated takeover of healthcare provisions in the RICs. Since then, as we were informed at the island RICs of Kos and Lesvos, vulnerability screening (medical) has become a regular aspect of the reception process. Nevertheless, ongoing deficiencies in personnel (in Kos, for instance, only 1 KEELPNO doctor and 4 nurses were deployed in January 2018, for a population consisting of nearly 700 vulnerable asylum seekers),91 availability of space (in Lesvos, in December 2017, social workers in the RIC lacked any type of working space), backlogs created throughout the period of transition from NGO-led to state-led medical provisions, as well as matters of over-congestion, still prohibited (and do so to this day) the system from functioning in an effective manner. Thus, at the time of our respective visits in both Lesvos and Kos (11-15 December 2017 and 10-12 January 2018, respectively), medical screening would as a rule take place a month following a person’s arrival at the RIC. Psychosocial assessment, on the other hand, which is ever more important for the recognition of less visible, but potentially more severe, vulnerabilities (e.g. victims of torture), when conducted, would as a rule take place in up to three times as much (3 months following arrival). In Evros, on the other hand, up to the 20th of December 2017 and not least due to the RIC’s small capacity (240 places accommodating slightly more than 300 applicants at 29