With all the boasting about heavy investment in health care by the Minister of Finance, crucial services needed for critical ill patients’ care are not being delivered in Mater Dei Hospital because no funds are available, the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses said.

Doctors regularly prescribe that certain patients require constant watch surveillance by a carer since such patients are critically ill or demented and could harm themselves, escape from hospital or become fatally ill. Since no funds are available, the management of Mater Dei Hospital is not hiring the necessary complement of carers.

If such patients manage to escape from hospital or even commit suicide, the nurses on that particular ward will face criminal charges and can be charged for involuntarily homicide. This is totally unfair on the nurses and midwives working in MDH, since such surveillance require extra staff than the normal ward compliment which the management of Mater Dei Hospital is not supplying.

This ongoing problem is not being addressed due to financial problems that Mater Dei Hospital has been facing these last years. Also there is huge mismanagement of carers currently occurring since some carers are allocated in overstaffed units.

MUMN is informing all Magistrates and all Police Inspectors, that when (and not if) they are summoned to investigate  the escape of a patient from Mater Dei Hospital, or the suicide of a patient, they should keep in their mind that the added staff which the management of Mater Dei Hospital had agreed to increase to the ward compliment has never materialized. The nurses and midwives on the wards are not to blame but it is the management of MDH which should be investigated.

 

Also the general public should be informed that if a civil suite is to be initiated in such cases, it is the hospital authority that should be taken to court and not the nurses or midwives on that particular ward.