Troubled Zammit Clapp Wards 1 and 2

I would like to point out a situation that is currently taking place in the annexed wards of Zammit Clapp Hospital which are situated in St Luke's. While the majority of the wards have four nurses and six nursing aides on every shift, Transitional Wards 1 and 2 have only two nurses and four nursing aides.

Now let me point out that each ward has the same number of patients except for TW2 which has one more than the others. The most troubling thing, however, is that the other wards are rehab and these two are for social cases. The difference between them is that rehab patients can more or less move around, and the majority of the social case patients are either bed-ridden or obese and have very limited or no motion ability altogether.

What I'm pointing out is that these nursing aides and nurses have a lot more work to do than their colleagues in other wards due to the fact that the bed-ridden patients have to move around every two hours or they can get bed sores while the obese patients, most of them due to size, have heavily restricted motion and have to count on the staff for even the most basic of needs.

The cherry on the cake is that these two wards had the same number of staff as the others until a few weeks ago, but that number was reduced for no good reason. On top of that, these already over-worked persons were recently bombarded with the importance of charting, thus adding more work.

In my opinion, the management is acting very unjustly with both the patients and the staff (who are going home from work exhausted every day). And one can only hope that this situation improves for the sake of even the staff's families who must endure the hardship of seeing their loved ones in that state.