Labour Party health spokesman Michael Farrugia said he was declining an invitation to take part in Monday’s BondiPlus programme which will discuss the MLP statement on the migration to Mater Dei Hospital, and the reply to that statement by Prof. Albert Fenech.

Dr Farrugia said he had made his points about the “gimmick” of the first medical procedure at the new hospital, which was purely cheap propaganda for the government.

It was not in the national interest for the controversy to continue, and if the Nationalist government wanted to make more such political gimmicks about such a serious sector, that was its business.

It was unprecedented for a supposedly current affairs programme to deal with a statement on one deplorable incident.

The programme was obviously unashamedly biased, as previous editions have shown, Dr Farrugia said.

In a counterstatement, the Department of Information said that what the MLP had said uncovered the “state of shame” that the MLP had fallen into after it had been for a time trying to turn the medical services into a political football.

Medical consultants and their teams carry out procedures to save people’s lives and they are not gimmicks, as the opposition was saying they were.

The government invited the opposition to be responsible, not to offend the medical profession and join the government to work to improve medical services.