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

On Monday, a patient was resuscitated in a corridor of the Casualty Ward 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 country”.

It said the Casualty Ward 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.

She said that there were several problems behind the increased waiting time for patients.

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.

There was also 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.

Furthermore, 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.

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 yesterday 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.

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