A Labour government would “give absolute priority” to primary healthcare, explore health sector public-private partnerships and engage family doctors and local pharmacists in sector reform.
The closure of a gerontology hospital at St Vincent De Paul home has further increased the patient workload at Mater Dei
Opposition health spokesman Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca slammed the measures adopted over the past week aimed at alleviating overcrowding at Mater Dei Hospital as “cosmetic measures and quick fixes”.
Decrying existing problems at Mater Dei Hospital as “tragic”, Ms Coleiro Preca called on the government to stop blaming others for its failures and admit its healthcare policy lacked planning and foresight.
Malta’s national hospital has come under scrutiny again over the past week amid more complaints about bed-strewn corridors, overworked nurses and unworkably long waiting lists.
Last week, Mater Dei Hospital CEO Joseph Caruana had said the hospital was coping with a higher influx of emergency room patients – something vehemently contested by the Emergency Nurses Union and which Mrs Coleiro Preca also denied.
“As of this morning, there were approximately 50 patients in corridors within emergency wards and another 24 stuck in the hospital’s Area 2, which is meant to host six patients,” she said yesterday.
Problems had reached breaking point, with patients requiring care in the hospital’s Intensive Treatment Unit ending up in theatre recovery rooms due to a lack of space.
She described the hospital situation using a couple of similes, first likening overcrowding to “a hospital scene out of a war movie” and then saying patients were being left in corridors “like stalls at an open-air market”.
Many of the existing overcrowding issues at Mater Dei were down to the government’s neglect of primary healthcare and its ill-thought decision to centralise healthcare, Mrs Coleiro Preca continued.
Government talk of rehabilitation wards at Karin Grech Hospital was misleading, she said, “because what the minister [Joe Cassar] doesn’t say is that these wards are primarily for the rehabilitation of the elderly rather than younger adults.”
The closure of a gerontology hospital at St Vincent De Paul home had further increased the patient workload at Mater Dei, she noted.
Mrs Coleiro Preca argued that had these places and healthcare centres functioned as they were intended to, monitoring and patient turnaround would have been much improved.
Instead, people were being faced with eight-month waiting lists for an MRI scan and anything up to an 18-month wait for an EMG scan, due to a contract having lapsed without being renewed.
Colonoscopy screening announced by the government during the last Budget had yet to manifest itself, as the necessary equipment still wasn’t available.
According to Mrs Coleiro Preca, the government had to “quit its empty promises and stop blaming the current healthcare crisis on the cold snap”.
“What would we do with people if there was to be a national disaster?” she asked.