Less than a month ago, this newspaper reported that Corradino Correctional Facility, which was built in Victorian times, still has some prison cells lacking facilities as fundamentally necessary to civilised living as flushing toilets. Now we hear that legionnaire’s disease has recently led to the death of a middle-aged patient in Mount Carmel Hospital because the water system of this 156-year-old Victorian building was “primitive… and belonged to the Middle Ages”.

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions,” as Claudius put it in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

In both Victorian buildings, successive governments have failed in the last 53 years to take the necessary action to remedy shortcomings in health and safety by investing adequately in modern hygiene. Their duty of care to the people who occupy these buildings, both staff and inmates, has been woefully negligent.

In the case of Mount Carmel, where some of the most vulnerable members of society are nursed back to mental health, the situation is even bleaker. Architects have declared wards as unsafe to house patients and staff and ordered their immediate closure. Sources have revealed that almost half of the Attard hospital has been condemned and patients were being crammed into the few wards that are certified as safe.

The situation is so dire that nurses and ancillary staff are refusing to continue working there, fearing for their own and mental patients’ safety. As a short-term measure, scaffolding has been installed to support parts of the ceiling. In more sensitive areas, architects have instructed workmen to use metal jacks to hold old beams in place. Wards are now overcrowded with some designed to take up to 30 patients having 38 or 40. Nurses have understandably given the authorities an ultimatum to address the “serious health and safety risks”.

It is clear Mount Carmel has been grossly under-resourced for years. A Health Ministry spokeswoman acknowledged it had “structural problems” but they were being addressed. She said works were being carried out to refurbish Male Ward 2, a new substance use disorder unit was being designed and parts of the water system were being replaced. Wooden beams in one ward and the adjacent corridors were being inspected, water ingress and electrical installation problems were being addressed and structural and service-related reports commissioned. Beams, ceilings, roof slabs and stairs were being inspected.

That is deeply worrying. A close reading of what the spokeswoman said clearly indicates that the health authorities’ response describes a limited amount of ongoing work but a huge amount of possible improvements that have not even started – being “designed”, “inspected” and/or “commissioned”. A project manager has still to be engaged to oversee the work.

This is not good enough. Mount Carmel Hospital has long been under-resourced and pretending otherwise.

In a Talking Point on this newspaper on Monday, mental health practitioners insisted that a new hospital is a “must”. Warning that mental illness, in its multiple ramifications, will become the biggest problem facing society in a very short while, they insisted that real change has to have a focus.

The way a government treats its most vulnerable mentally-ill patients – as well as its prisoners – is a mark of its civilisation and humanity. Malta has a long way to go.