A patient at the psychiatric hospital drank Dettol and another consumed shower gel because there are not enough nurses to supervise them, The Sunday Times of Malta has learnt.
The incidents prompted nurses at Mount Carmel Hospital to sign a petition and write to the Attorney General renouncing their responsibility for patients’ well-being.
The shortage of nurses at the hospital, especially following a number of post-election transfers, has led to a situation where there are not enough nurses to tend to patients who, on doctors’ orders, are placed on level one, which means they have to be constantly monitored by a nurse who cannot be more than an arm’s length away.
These patients, who are usually suicidal or could do something to endanger their lives or that of other patients and hospital staff, were being treated like the other patients at the psychiatric hospital.
Nurses who spoke to The Sunday Times of Malta on condition of anonymity said the state of affairs at the hospital had reached a low point.
The two patients who drank disinfectant and shower gel were taken to Mater Dei Hospital for treatment and were discharged soon after.
“The situation can be deadly in such cases. Nurses and patients are suffering,” they said.
The nurses said the shortage was also causing them more stress. They are being refused leave and the management was also refusing to allow overtime to replace those who were on vacation, in order to keep costs low.
“We have reached a point where we have to ask someone to replace us if we want to take leave,” they said.
In their letter to the Attorney General, the nurses said they would not be held legally liable to patients who required level one supervision.
They lamented that the nursing staff complement at Mount Carmel “is not even adequate to provide the necessary nursing care for the standard patients let alone for the intensive care patients who usually require more supervision”.
The nurses said such treatment was rarely being provided due to the huge shortage of nurses.
“Since such essential treatment is not being provided, we will therefore not be held responsible for such high-risk patients,” the nurses said in their letter.
When contacted, the nurses’ union compared the situation at MCH to a “time-bomb”, adding that while doctors’ who issued such treatment orders “just decide and leave”, nurses had to face such situations alone.
A Health Ministry spokesman admitted that one-to-one supervision was “not always logistically possible”. Instead, he said patients were grouped together and supervised by a nurse.
To solve this problem in the long-term, the management of Mount Carmel Hospital was working on the development of protocols to make the choice of patients and allocation of nurses in a more structured and efficient manner.
The authorities were also working on developing a Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit where such patients can be nursed in a more efficient and effective way.
Questions related to these specific incidents and whether these were investigated remained unanswered by the time of going to print.
Times of Malta reported yesterday how nurses at Mount Carmel were forced to intervene to stop a teenage boy from engaging in sexual relations with other patients in a mixed ward where he had been for the last three months.
mxuereb@timesofmalta.com