The waiting blame

I refer to Thomas Fenech's (Head of the Department of Ophthalmology, Mater Dei Hospital) detailed defence of his department (June 14) in response to The Times editorial of June 9.

The editorial pointed quite a thick finger at the doctors and surgeons in the said department leaving Mr Fenech no way out but to show where the real problem lies, namely with the planners of Mater Dei and the present administration.

Asking for more staff and still not getting it after 10 years must indeed be frustrating for Mr Fenech and his firm, but, I am sure everyone will concede, not one bit as frustrating as having to wait five years for an operation.

Some simple arithmetic will help clarify the matter. We are not told what the number of eye surgeons at Mater Dei is at the moment, nor how many the department has been asking for. But we do know that some 1,400 cataract operations are carried out every year.

Now let's say there are just four working days in a week, 208 in a year; this would mean that every day our eye surgeons are removing an average of seven cataracts. Mr Fenech also tells us that each operation lasts some 20 minutes; that works out to a total of about 2½ hours per day, four days a week, 10 hours per week. But, wait a minute, to get those 10 hours of theatre use the ophtalmology surgeons have to work even on Sundays, and not just on normal working days.

Something must therefore be really bad in our national health system if our super hospital can afford only this much for these patients. They cannot see very clearly, true, but now, thanks to Mr Fenech's statement, they have begun to have a clearer view of the situation.

I do not think cataract sufferers were very interested in the medical details he dwelt upon; nor in the many other duties these doctors see to every day; perhaps not even much in the success rate they achieve. This latter is even expected. But this multitude of blurred-eyed human beings, eagerly waiting to see what their eye surgeons really look like, now know that they should stop knocking at their doctors' door and that it's high time they started disturbing those who brought about this sad state of affairs in a state-of-the-art hospital.

It doesn't look like those responsible have lost much sleep over this problem these last 10 years, now does it?