People living in Marsascala have to do with a Health Division clinic that opens for 90 minutes twice a week, between 7.30 and 9 a.m. every Tuesday and Friday! This, considering that 10,000 people live in Marsascala permanently and which number goes up to over 30,000 in summer, is an absurdity, especially since the town has for the last 20 years been registering one of the fastest population growth rates in Malta!
I go to this clinic to request a re-order of (and three weeks later to collect) Timoptol drops, which I am entitled to (yellow card and all) because of my glaucoma, a condition quite common in Malta. I may choose to go to the Paola health clinic but I prefer not to because of the large crowds and the long hours waiting in a roofless interior yard with only a couple of trees for a bit of protection from the elements (if I’m lucky enough to manage a squeeze-in beneath those trees). There is also the extreme torture of having to roam around Paola in search of a place to park, a problem that is now so very part of Paola each day of the week.
One may also say: Go by bus. That’s out of the question because, like most people here, I live on the outskirts of Marsascala, where public transport was always close to non-existent and with the arrival of Arriva it will completely become declared officially extinct. That means a downhill walk of about two miles going and another two-mile long walk uphill coming – the downhill and uphill elements are enormously steep. No weak of heart is advised to try it! There is one option: either going blind or suffering a cardiac arrest! And that is no option!
Another problem is that, apart from the fact that the dose I am given never suffices for my prescribed needs, the procedure is such that each time I call for my drops the doctor on call makes out a new prescription for me! These procedures baffle the mind because the Health Division people certainly know that: glaucoma is for life. The purpose of Timoptol is to not let the condition get worse. Without the daily drop in each eye every morning and evening, I go blind within a year; Timoptol drops are too expensive for a pensioner to buy on a regular basis, for life and re-ordering such essential medicine like Timoptol should take into consideration basic stock control principles like reordering time lapse and stock availability.
That means that the three-week waiting time for the supply to come through has to be taken into consideration against the number of bottles of Timoptol being reordered. At present, thanks to the stubborn stupidity of those whose job it is to supply us with free medicine, I am obliged to buy out of my pension 25 per cent of my Timoptol needs.
Furthermore, the people at the Health Division have decided that a bottle contains exactly 100 drops and that means in my case each bottle is to last me 25 days (four drops daily). I fail to understand why these people do not take into consideration that a drop may sometimes fall on the nose not on the eye; a drop may be a mite bigger than normal; and the last few drops almost always remain in the bottle and never make it out and to the eye.
Why should those Health Division people (the chief pharmacist, I stand to be corrected, of course) be so parsimonious with distribution of such an essential medicine? It is, after all, given free to all who suffer from glaucoma! Nobody else has any use for that medicine! It runs no risk of being or becoming abused, resold or wasted! What is it they want to prove? There should be serious allowances and consideration for reordering stock and reordering time span.
These problems would disappear if the people responsible show more humanity!