The mental health commissioner needs to be guaranteed independence and given security of tenure because, as things stand now, he might be reluctant to flag certain issues.
Nationalist Party health spokesman Claudio Grech said this yesterday during a press conference at the party’s headquarters in Pietà on the occasion of World Mental Health Day.
He said the commissioner had to safeguard the patients’ interests without fearing any government backlash. For this reason, Mr Grech will next week be filing a Private Members’ Bill in Parliament proposing that a two-thirds parliamentary majority would be required to remove a person occupying the office of mental health commissioner.
He referred to a number of “strange” cases, including one where a man was admitted to Mount Carmel Hospital after being arrested while protesting in front of the Prime Minister’s office in Valletta.
We expect the government to support this Bill
He said a 10-year-old boy had been admitted to a seclusion ward with adults and, in another incident, force was used on a patient who complained he was fed up watching Labour’s TV station. Both cases occurred at Mount Carmel earlier this year, Mr Grech said.
Distancing himself from claims that there were ulterior motives behind these cases, he argued that, to safeguard patients’ interests, the mental health watchdog had to be independent.
He noted that Chief Justice Emeritus Vincent de Gaetano, a judge of the European Court of Human Rights, last February made a similar call during a seminar on mental health.
Dr De Gaetano had remarked that, under the present model, the commissioner had no security of tenure and so he could not criticise the government.
The Private Members’ Bill would propose changes to the Mental Health Act, approved in Parliament in late 2012, Mr Grech said. Though the law came into force in October last year, it was only yesterday that provisions dealing with admission into psychiatric hospitals and community care became effective.
“We expect the government to support this Bill,” he said.
Asked about government plans to exclude the premium paid for private health insurances from taxable income, Mr Grech said the Opposition agreed in principle.
However, prior to introducing such a measure the insurance sector had to be reformed to ensure such policies gave a basic coverage to a wide range of health conditions.
Mr Grech said he was worried that policyholders could be “victims of small print” because, in certain cases, they would not be fully aware that certain health conditions would not have been covered.
It would be wrong to trade free healthcare with private health insurance, he added.