The Ministry of Health said this evening that it was ready to hold talks with the MUMN when it withdrew industrial action which ‘hurt’ patients.

The ministry was reacting to a press conference held by the nurses’ union this morning.

It again condemned the industrial action while expressing appreciation for the work done by nurses.

“The government cannot understand how the union, instead of cooperating to improve the situation, through the engagement of foreign nurses and the training of more students, is instead issuing directives which only serve to hurt the patients and their families while giving a bad name to the nursing profession.”

In their press conference this morning, MUMN officials denied that their directives undermined patient safety and said that it was the government’s failure to solve the problem of the acute shortage of nurses which harmed patients.

The union has called industrial action at health centres, the Renal Unit and at Mt Carmel, where nurses have been directed not to collect medicines for the wards from the hospital pharmacy.

Union president Paul Pace insisted that the directives issued to the nurses were not illegal, and he hit out at the Health Department, which, he said, was asking nurses to sign declarations that they would continue to provide essential services. Such declarations, he said, should be ignored, more so since no definition was being given of what constituted an essential service.

Not inputting information into a computer and not carrying medicines from the stores did not mean that essential services were not being maintained, he said.

He also insisted that patients were never deprived of medicines and the government was wrong to claim that patients' lives were endangered.

Mr Pace said Malta had a shortage of 550 nurses and some nurses even raked up overtime of 80 hours per week.

"Malta needs to invest now in nursing education," he said. The intake of students in courses was inadequate and needed to be raised, he stressed.

Mr Pace said that the MUMN was being backed by the European Federation of Nurses in its dispute. While the Health Ministry was seeking to recruit nurses from Pakistan, this had been described by the European federation as "not an ethical, professional, economic and political solution."

He said other issues also needed to be resolved, even at Mater Dei Hospital, including the shortage of beds and the mixing of medical and surgical patients.

At Mt Carmel, he said, the government also needed to tackle a bed shortage and security, especially when patients were aggressive.

He also insisted that the government needed to install a back-up generator at Mt Carmel, rather than waste money, as it did when it held the Worker of the Year award at the hospital.

He said that nurses had been directed to place all ward gas lamps in front of the office of the hospital CEO, and to walk out of the wards if there was a power failure.

The nurses, he said, were not maintenance staff, and they were also not porters, who should be the ones delivering medicines to the wards.