Last April, the American College of Physicians - the largest medical speciality in the United States - issued new guidelines on mammography screening for women aged 40-49, wrote Lisa Shuartz and Steven Noloshin, both associate professors at the Department of Veterans Medical Centre, Virginia, USA, in the British Medical Journal editorial of October 13.
Rather than call for universal screening, the guidelines recommend that women make an informed decision after learning about the benefits and harms of mammography.
The Budget for 2008 boasted of massive and exhaustive consul-tation with all the stakeholders and the public in general. This technique of consulting the man in the street reminds one of the time when some urged the abolition of courts and proposed carrying out judgments in the village square according to the choice of the masses.
This method of decision-making may appear to be a good vote-catcher, but is it the best way of taking decisions of great significance to the nation? Does it not make more sense to consult the experts?
In the proposed massive mammography screening campaign it appears that academic experts were left out of the consultation.
The same seems to apply to the selection of drugs that are offered free of charge to the public. Although an infinite amount of paperwork is involved, it appears that all this work is not needed at all - it is an unnecessarily bureaucratic expense and often results in denying the supply of drugs to those who need more convincing to agree to use them.
Again, the experts in pharmaco-economics at our University are rarely, if ever, consulted on such areas of national importance.
It is strange that large countries like the US and the UK find it important to consult academic experts who very often are available in universities, but in Malta, where all know who the experts are, consultations are not the order of the day.
The advantage of maintaining the highest standards at the local University, and of attracting other useful institutes of learning to Malta, is that the country will have the relevant experts available a few miles away from where they are needed.
However, there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. The government has stated that the discussions should be ongoing, and budgeting should be a continuous interactive operation. One is therefore hopeful that consultations will continue and that they will now be extended to the experts. Many of these are found at our University.
Opposition leader Alfred Sant has hinted that if the Labour Party is elected, it might even include experts in decisions taken at Cabinet level. How about Cabinet starting the practice of listening to academic experts before taking decisions, which, however popular, only give the best results if they are carried out in a scientific and experienced manner?