Mater Dei Hospital was opened with great fanfare in 2007. The 250,000 square metre complex at Tal-Qroqq is an acute general teaching facility offering hospital and general services for 1,000 beds and has 25 operating theatres.
The hospital has enjoyed a chequered history, blighted from the beginning by political and administrative infighting and riddled with accountability and management problems. It was designed and built by a consortium led by the Swedish construction firm, Skanska Malta JV, and included Maltese developers Blokrete and Devlands and took almost 15 years to complete. When first conceived, it was estimated to cost around €116 million but the expense escalated to about €600 million by the time it was completed.
Experience has shown that, as some predicted, the hospital was not large enough to cope with Malta’s needs. To compound these conceptual shortfalls, there are now serious questions about the quality and safety of the construction itself. These first came to light last autumn when a plan to build two additional floors to house two 68-bed wards (since considerably extended) on the accident and emergency department building to relieve pressure on the hospital had to be abandoned as it was discovered – following comprehensive structural tests by Arup, an independent London-based firm – that the building would not support the planned new structures.
Following the discovery of the weak concrete columns in the emergency building, Arup was invited to extend their examination to structures throughout the whole hospital as well as the oncology hospital that is still being built.
The fundamental problem which the stress tests conducted by Arup has exposed is that the strength of concrete mix used in building Mater Dei may have been deficient, thus weakening the structures throughout the hospital.
Initial reports of the outcome of Arup’s comprehensive assessment appear to indicate that the hospital, which was supposedly built to resist earthquakes – the only building of its kind in Malta, is not only structurally vulnerable but is not even seismic-proof.
While the new oncology hospital has been given a clean bill of health, it appears that the costs of strengthening the emergency building could exceed €5 million, while the cost of remedying structural faults found elsewhere throughout the hospital could rise to several million euros. Arup will present is final assessments to the Minister for Health shortly.
A board of inquiry headed by Judge Philip Sciberras is also examining all the documents connected with the building of Mater Dei and interviewing the various companies, architects, surveyors and engineers that were involved in its construction. This is a formidable forensic task which may expose serious contractual concerns and, hopefully, point to commercial liability. The costs to the taxpayer if contractual financial liability is not identified will be substantial.
If the scale of the problems at Mater Dei exposed by these initial reports is to be believed, the country is facing a significant financial bill and a monumental scandal. The lives of vulnerable patients at Mater Dei have been placed in grave jeopardy by apparently incompetent – or, worse, possibly crooked – building contractors and architects who failed to do the job for which the taxpayer had so handsomely paid.
It is hoped that once the board of inquiry has reported not only will the necessary legal action be taken against those culpable but also that the Parliamentary Accounts Committee will examine what lessons can be learnt from this major construction debacle so that those who were politically and administratively responsible can be held to account.