I am not an expert on health; however I do meet people who experience problems when needing some kind of health service. I myself during this last year needed to make use of this service. Without any doubt those who provide a service at the hospital do sterling work. The problem in my humble opinion is that of management and administration.

Minister John Dalli, who is now responsible for the health sector, admitted that the hospital waiting lists are scandalous and that it was unheard of that one had to wait up to five years for certain operations. A Nationalist Minister is saying all this after almost 20 years of a Nationalist administration. If we ever needed a certificate of the state of the health sector here it is. All this sheds a bad light on previous Nationalist administrations.

It is useless to have a state-of-the-art hospital (and I am not going to comment on the amount spent, allegations of corruption and the long time it took to be built). It is good to have trained and well-prepared staff and professionals who, in large part, are dedicated in their work, or rather mission. We also need better administration and management. The government of the day needs to do all that is possible not to neglect the health sector as was done by this government, which after all is a continuation of the previous administrations.

Who neglected primary health care? Why are we in need of more nurses, doctors and other professionals? The reason for this is that the government did not provide the necessary tools or conditions to have a complete service. Now we have to wait and see whether some sort of corrective measures will be taken by this administration to try to give a better service to all Maltese citizens who after all are paying taxes to receive a decent health service.

Well said, Minister Dalli, better late than never. Now we wait for concrete actions.

An elevated Speaker

A couple of days ago, former Foreign Minister Michael Frendo spoke in Parliament about the post of the Speaker and suggested that the Speaker should be elevated to the third highest position in the country. We always refer to the House of Representatives as the highest institution in the country. However one must say that this is not reflected in the way its members are treated. It is enough to say that the protocol list reflects this as well.

More resources should be made available to all Members of Parliament if we expect, and rightly so, that members do their work better and professionally. I believe that if the post of the Speaker were to be elevated as suggested by Dr Frendo, this would be a good starting point.

One final comment. It is a real pity that when Dr Frendo was a minister and he could do something to arrange this situation, he did not do so. He might recall an informal conversation with the undersigned because I still remember it.

Sports facilities

As one of my responsibilities is sport, I am invited to a number of sports activities. Recently I was invited to three inaugurations of artificial grounds, that of Melita at Pembroke, St Patrick’s at Zabbar and at Senglea. It is very positive that our football clubs and nurseries are all aiming to have decent premises and artificial pitches. This will hopefully attract more children and youth to start or continue to practise sports, in this case football.

One must also commend the effort that many volunteers are doing for the benefit of sport and their club. As a country we need to put sport further up on the national agenda. The Malta Labour Party actively worked before the last general election to do so and in fact we published a vision statement about sport, which was going to guide us in government. This vision statement is still valid and I suggest that the present administration takes a close look at it as they did in the not-so-distant past when some of our proposals were proposed in the last budget.

We need to inculcate in every person a positive attitude towards sports and physical activity. We need to start with children at school. Schools are not oriented towards promoting and providing the required time for sports activities. We have been saying this for years but nothing tangible has happened.

To start with we need to adopt the recommendations of the World Health Organisation that every child does at least five hours of physical activity per week. There are other things that are mentioned in the Labour Party’s vision statement for sport which, if implemented, will lead to an improvement in sports and physical activity in Malta. If the present administration truly believes in the benefits of sport and physical activity, they should pass from words to concrete action.

Carmelo Abela is the Deputy Speaker and Labour Member of Parliament

www.carmeloabela.org