Your editorial, Easing the pain (TMID, 1 August) thoroughly impressed me. With all due respect, it is quite obvious that with regard to certain “tintinnabulation” concerning Mater Dei, you are off the mark.

First of all, St Luke’s Hospital will certainly not, I repeat not, be making way for the new complex for want of larger exigencies of a growing population.

Have you ever heard of somebody building a house with tiny cubicles for rooms yet going for a massive garden? That alas is the new complex being built at Tal-Qroqq. More space for patients to enter the hospital there certainly is, but the cubicles where doctors are to attend to their patients are akin to the space of a prison cell.

Whether it has been mentioned or not, there is no way on earth that treatment there will be for free. If the services at St Luke’s Hospital were free of charge, this hospital with certain apparatus and medical equipment which cost thousands of liri will indeed propel the government to insist that money should be paid for certain treatment.

It is virtually impossible for the gigantic hospital to keep running without payment for services rendered, services which ex Prime Minister Dom Mintoff made free of charge in St Luke’s Hospital. Indeed, as you stated, it is not the building that makes a hospital but the services given.

As you said, the Malta Labour Party is right to point fingers at the administration just as it is also correct in praising the staff working in hospital but puts the blame on the management.

Why is it that when one is short of doctors and the nurse in charge reports this to the administration, all she gets for her pains is an indirect “handle it yourself”.

Why are consultants and doctors permitted leave when around 80 patients turn up with only just two doctors to attend to them and the rest of the staff is left to face the music?

If certain medicines are out of stock now, what difference will Mater Dei bring about? Will there suddenly be a flow of medicine that have been patients have been deprived of just because the building is different?

Let us put the record straight. There are consultants and there are consultants. There are doctors and there are doctors. There is a mixed combination of doctors and consultants who have a conscience and total vocation. There are others who do not.

Right you were when you wrote that the staff at St Luke’s Hospital – nursing aids, ward clerks and others – do the best they can for the patients, though of course these are demoralised, and not only because they cannot carry out their job properly.

Good health is certainly the most precious thing in the world we have but second comes money. If St Luke’s was restored into a better hospital, Mater Dei Hospital might never have been born and services would have remained free.

Valerie Borg

Valletta