For many people in the Maltese islands, April 5 is just another day of the year. However, for us at St Luke’s Hospital, today marks the anniversary of the beginning of our story and the 87th year since the foundations of our home were laid, back in 1930.
This first stone, laid by the British Governor, Sir John Du Cane, in the presence of Prime Minister Lord Gerald Strickland and other dignitaries, came after a long debate and several years of delay.
In 1878, a decision was made to build a new hospital because the central hospital, which up to that point was the main facility, had become ill-suited to meet the needs of the growing population. However, it took 52 years for the foundations to be laid, followed by another 10 years of construction till the hospital started to be used in 1940.
In the years that followed, St Luke’s was transformed from being an isolation hospital to being Malta’s only general hospital, providing care for the people of Malta and all the sick or wounded on our islands. Various extensions followed throughout the years, including the opening of the Karin Grech wing, in 1979, and the opening of the burns unit and the hyperbaric unit in 1989.
Since the opening of Mater Dei Hospital in 2007, the glorious building that is St Luke’s has been left in a dilapidated state and functionally having only a small physiotherapy and occupational therapy department.
Various attempts in recent years to highlight the importance of St Luke’s as an ancillary facility and develop much-needed services, such as rehabilitation, and to have complete care pathways in place had, until recently, failed to materialise but we are today paving the way for a new reality.
Under the leadership of Vitals Global Healthcare, we are now laying new foundations, not only in the physical sense, but also through investment in our people and in the tools required to provide care. We are well on our way to provide much better geriatric and rehabilitation services to the community we serve.
We are well on our way to provide much better geriatric and rehabilitation services to the community we serve
The transformation will not happen overnight but all hands are on deck working to see that the vision for our hospitals will materialise as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
The hospital is being completely stripped and cleaned from the inside, plans for demolition being prepared and schematics for the various clinical programmes are being designed.
Karin Grech Hospital is on its way to becoming a specialised geriatric centre that will cater for all the needs of the elderly, from the immediate post-acute period, thus also offloading a geriatric caseload from Mater Dei as the hospital will have all the facilities to deal with such care.
St Luke’s is being transformed into a modern rehabilitation facility with a five-fold increase in beds, including a new orthotics and prosthetics centre and a clinical area for innovative technologies, a key development in the whole centre.
Members of staff have embarked on a programme for improvement in quality and patient safety under the guidance of consultants from Partners Healthcare International of Boston, a branch of the original Harvard Medical School.
Staff members are, therefore, revamping documentation, reviewing quality control methods, bettering facility management and developing IT systems that have, so far, been missing from our system.
We are bringing in more people to work with us, while new equipment is also being procured in order to give the best tools possible to our very professional and caring staff.
Plans to group patients according to the different pathologies are also under way, keeping in mind that part of the hospital will be host to more medical students from Barts Medical School in their second year of programme as from autumn 2018.
Enthusiasm is running high within our hospital as staff members look forward to having an environment well suited to offer a sterling service and which will allow all patients to be able to have all the necessary facilities to recover as much as possible and return to the community in a positive way.
It is a project that will restore glory to St Luke’s and all stakeholders should, with a clear conscience and for the common good, strive to see that such a project forms an integral part of our health system offering the best possible patient care.
I repeat and endorse the words of historian Paul Cassar, echoed by previous writers on this day: “May St Luke’s Hospital and all its extensions keep abreast of the scientific evolutionary process to safeguard and respect the dignity of patients entrusted to its care with that evangelical, psychological and spiritual support enjoined by the physician and saint – Luke.”
Stephen Zammit is CEO at St Luke’s Hospital.