At 5 p.m. yesterday there were nine patients in Casualty waiting for a bed in the ward, down from 31 the day before, according to the Health Ministry.

The increased efforts to cut waiting times for admissions in the acute general hospital comes in the wake of an incident where a patient was resuscitated in an emergency corridor on Monday in full view of those around him. It was the second such event in less than a year after another patient underwent CPR in a corridor in February.

The situation was described by the Emergency Nurses’ Union, which revealed the incident, as that of “a third world”. It said the Casualty corridor held some 31 patients at one time and most of the patients had been waiting over 24 hours for a bed in another ward.

“The ministry has been working around the clock to ensure that beds are made available,” a ministry spokesman said yesterday.

The problems behind the increased waiting time for patients were threefold, she said. Firstly, there had been an increase in gastroenteritis causing higher admissions. To make matters worse, casualty suffered a staff shortage on Sunday night due to four doctors being sick with this illness.

Secondly, there was the problem of a low turnover of beds as people waiting for long-term care were taking long to clear the Mater Dei Hospital beds. Thirdly, she said, too many people were going to Mater Dei instead of seeking care from their GP or a primary health centre, increasing the waiting time at Accident and Emergency.

Moreover, people going to primary health centres were still being referred to Mater Dei, sometimes unnecessarily, she said. For this reason the government had set up a peer review committee to look into this problem.

The peer review GP committee is investigating whether doctors in health centres are being negligent or passing on their responsibility to other doctors by referring them to hospital. According to the government, this goes against the policy that patients should be treated in polyclinics whenever possible.

“There needs to be better administration, not only in Mater Dei Hospital, to solve the problem of long waiting hours for beds,” the spokesman said, pointing out the government was working to increase the number of beds in long-term care hospitals.

The Medical Association of Malta denied that long waiting times in the A&E department were due to inappropriate referrals by doctors in health centres, as suggested by the ministry.

“Statistics show that more than half of attendances at Accident and Emergency are self-referred, meaning they had not been seen by a family doctor,” the MAM said, emphasising that while this was understandable for major emergencies, it was this problem that resulted in unnecessary congestion and bottlenecks.

Every medical practitioner decided independently, making a professional judgment on the need for referral, MAM said. In medicine, sometimes, even minor complaints needed urgent referral to hospital. Every medical practitioner was taught in medical school that if the situation was unclear, the patient should be referred for further investigation, avoiding unnecessary risks.

“It is not fair of the government to put the blame on GPs,” MAM president Martin Balzan said when contacted, emphasising that doctors should not be taking such risks.

The association invited the health authorities to tackle the problem seriously without blaming doctors.

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