Crowding at Mater Dei Hospital’s emergency department would make it impossible to handle a major accident, such as a bus crash, the Emergency Nurses Union warned yesterday.
The union said overcrowding at the department was caused when patients would be waiting on stretchers to be followed up in a hospital ward once beds were freed up.
With 50 or so patients who would typically be waiting in the corridors, union president John Zammit said he would not want to imagine the “chaos” if a major disaster occurred. “Imagine a van overturns and there are five seriously injured students. I don’t know where we’re going to place them,” he said.
“The overcrowding problem kept growing and the (health) minister had said it was a seasonal problem but it’s not... We’re trying to give a service, but we can’t.”
“We know the hospital is small. We need areas to increase beds. Forget social cases. We’ve got an ageing population. The demands are there. We need more beds, there’s no other way,” Mr Zammit stressed.
“We’re either going to do something or else act like children and take industrial action,” he added.
This is not the first time industrial action has been mentioned by the union. It had threatened to strike last January but called it off in the interest of patients. “Now it’s about time the union gives directives to its members,” Mr Zammit said, adding that he would be speaking more about this in the future.
While acknowledging there was a bed shortage problem, Health Minister Joe Cassar said the problem was not as constant as the ENU was making it out to be and that even last year there was a surge in summer.
He said the problem should, however, be eased when Zammit Clapp Hospital reopened in September, adding another 100 beds for fully-dependent patients.
He said that even if extra wards were built, there would still be a problem of who would run them.
“The more dependent a patient is, the more staff and nurses we would need per patient. It’s useless to open a ward without having the people to run it,” Dr Cassar said, adding the ministry was awaiting the results of the nursing course, which would inject more nurses into the health care system.
Dr Cassar urged nurses to cooperate with his ministry’s drive to recruit nurses from all over the world to address the shortage: “The solution we need is that the nursing council and Maltese nurses facilitate the entry of the hundreds of international nurses who want to work here and let them work, not try and do their utmost to not let them work,” Dr Cassar said.