Paul Pace, the president of the MUMN, is under the impression that a professional chemotherapy service can be provided in Gozo by sending over a couple of nurses from Boffa Hospital. This is rather like saying that cardiac bypass surgery can be done in Gozo by sending over a couple of theatre nurses. Apart from the sheer nonsense of this statement I doubt he will find many Gozitans volunteering for this kind of service.

Next he accuses me of playing dirty and of having political motivations. As I have no interest in any political party it is hard to understand what he could possibly mean by this. Then we have that old chestnut, private practice, as yet another devious motive for my position. Perhaps it did not occur to him that in order to have chemotherapy privately a Gozitan patient would still have to travel to Malta.

He asks why I stopped the service rather than reported the cases. In the first instance there was no service to stop. In the 24 years I have worked for the Health Department there has never been a chemotherapy service in Gozo. What we did have was the very occasional administration of chemotherapy in Gozo to patients who refused to travel to Malta and this against medical advice. The two sad events I described were more than enough to convince me we could not permit this any longer.

As for reporting the cases there was nothing to report. There was no negligence or incompetence involved. Chemotherapy carries with it a risk of death which increases with the intensity of the treatment and decreases with the experience of the medical team. Deaths resulting from complications of chemotherapy are not ‘reportable’ either in Malta, Gozo or the Royal Marsden, where the Government sends its most difficult cases. The fact that there have been no more deaths in Gozo from this cause for the last 15 years is of course the result of my decision rather than a trivialisation of the matter.