The nurses’ union lashed out at the government for using codes instead of names when consultants were mentioned in Parliament on Monday.
This was “not right”, the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses said adding Chris Fearne was not acting as a parliamentary secretary with people’s interests at heart but as a consultant surgeon protecting those who may be underperforming.
Nationalist MP Claudio Grech tabled a question asking how many operations had been performed by each surgeon at Mater Dei Hospital. In his reply, Health Minister Konrad Mizzi listed a “consultant code” instead of a name.
Mr Fearne later said this was a data protection measure to avoid people drawing the wrong conclusions due to cases in which the main duty of a surgeon was interventions rather than operations.
“The MUMN hopes that other professions working in hospitals are protected under the pretext of data protection,” union president Paul Pace said.
People should not be taken fora ride
He also referred to waiting times at Mater Dei Hospital’s emergency department.
Mr Pace noted that the Health Division said recently it had introduced a tracking system at the department that would be setting a maximum waiting time of six hours.
“If this were the case, MUMN would be the first to congratulate the Health Division because it would be a great achievement for patients and people making use of emergency,” he said.
On Tuesday, Mr Fearne told Parliament a recently-introduced tracking system at emergency had helped reduce patients’ waiting times “very satisfactorily”, down to an average of four hours.
The MUMN said that when European hospitals declared a six-hour waiting time in emergency, it meant the actual time between when a person entered the waiting room and was transferred to a bed.
What happened locally, it added, was that once the six hours were up and the person was seen by staff, the patient would endure another six to eight hours, if not a day or two waiting in a cubicle or in the emergency ward’s corridor since no beds were free.
“People should not be taken for a ride and the MUMN regrets having to point out that what the Health Division is presenting is literally a false pretext.”
Questions sent to the Health Parliamentary Secretariat were not answered at the time of writing.