OBJECTIVES: UHC is the largest hospital in Crete and among the 5 largest hospitals in Greece. With the implementation of the memorandum, all operators were asked to reduce their costs, while special emphasis was placed on decreasing healthcare costs. In 2012, in this context, UHC made various attempts to diminish its budget. METHODS: Two events happened in 2012: •  Pharmaceutical companies were asked to offer discounts for their products’ price. •  A central unit for the cytostatics drugs’ dilution for all oncologic therapies was founded. Good management and economy of scale succeeded in quantity saving of drugs that were re-entered in pharmacy’s stock. RESULTS: The effect of these combined actions was examined in achieving the goal of reducing the pharmaceutical expenditure. In order for the data to be comparable, only the drugs used in the CU were studied. Specifically, there are 113 medications (62 prototypes, 31 generics and 20 orphan drugs), which derived from 23 companies. In 2012, 100.000 units were consumed in hospital that worth 10 M€. The combined results were impressive as a budget reduction of 21.4% was achieved (15.4% due to discounts and 6% due to the CU). As per the discounts, 82% of cytostatics’ value represents prototypes and expensive drugs, which were limited to the legal rebate of 5% discount, while 17% is mostly generics whose discounts varied from 29.5 to 92.9%. Thus, 73.4% of the value benefit was due to generic and 26.6% due to the prototype drugs. As for the CU’s savings, 6,000 pieces were returned to the pharmacy.  91.7% of the value benefit derived from the prototypes and the remaining 8.3% from the generic and orphan drugs. CONCLUSIONS: Taking into consideration that cytostatic drugs’ cost equals 1/3 of the total pharmaceutical expenditure, even if only these two events were taking place, a 7.1% budget decrease was achieved.