Prime Minister Joseph Muscat yesterday ordered the removal of a tent set up outside Mater Dei Hospital that drove the nurses’ union to register a dispute.
The canopy, erected outside the Day Care Unit in the morning, set alarm bells ringing in the wake of recent reports of a serious shortage of beds and nurses.
A spokesman for the Office of the Prime Minister said that certain decisions had to be taken because the situation inherited from the previous Administration was “scandalous”.
“The intentions are good but the decision to erect a tent and put the reception area there was wrong.
“We want the quality of patients and staff at Mater Dei to improve, not deteriorate. Patients and staff have to be treated with dignity at all times,” the spokesman said.
The intentions are good but the decision was wrong
A Health Ministry spokesman explained earlier that the tent was meant to serve as a temporary reception area until February in the case of an influx of patients suffering from influenza, as was usual at this time of the year.
In the meantime, the Day Care Unit reception would have been turned into a treatment area.
The Nationalist Party said the decision to set up the tent was unexplainable and insensitive.
It urged the Health Ministry to do all that was necessary for patients to be given the care they deserved in dignity.
The tent had irked the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses so much that it issued directives without notice, as per the civil service agreement.
Nurses were directed to stick to one specific role as from today.
Union president Paul Pace said the directive meant, for example, that surgical nurses at the unit should only carry out surgical duties and not medicinal and administrative roles as was currently the situation.
Nurses, he added, were tired and “drowning” in work.
In a statement, the union said its officials had to leave a social function organised by the Labour Party to attend to the nurses’ “angry calls”.
The reception area was not adequate to nurse patients, it said.
“Next decision might be the roof or the car park. The long-standing problems at Mater Dei Hospital are just being shifted to corridors and to reception areas and not at all properly addressed.”
Nurses at the unit were disappointed and demotivated, the union added.
“Nurses are being treated in a shameful manner with all hospital policies being broken due to bed shortages.”
The Prime Minister ordered the tent’s removal in the afternoon.
Sources told this newspaper that in the past few days there was unprecedented crowding at the hospital, both at the inpatient and outpatient departments.
Nurses treated in shameful manner
While outpatient departments were inundated with appointments, inpatients were being accommodated in corridors.
However, hospital CEO Joseph Caruana said the outpatients departments were not unusually crowded, noting that Wednesdays had traditionally been the busiest.
He explained that when the inpatient influx was high, as happened in winter, patients were accommodated in three designated admission holding wards, in the day care area ward and, in case of an overflow, in one of the corridors, with the latter fluctuating between zero and 15 patients a day.
“There is no major issue with outpatients. All professions within the hospital are doing their utmost to give safe and effective care to patients, even though there is a level of overcrowding.
“Patients who are not in acute phase are being progressively moved to other hospital facilities to make space at Mater Dei for acutely ill patients,” he said.