Over the past days we have all witnessed disgraceful scenes coming out of Mater Dei Hospital. And we have heard worse from statements made to the media.

There were scenes where elderly patients were moved out of hospital in the middle of the night and sent to private homes for the elderly or to St Vincent de Paule.

There were scenes of people waiting on wheelchairs in the Emergency Department for hours on end, both before and after being seen by the harassed staff there, because no bed could be found for them in the hospital’s wards.

There were comments made by people working in the A&E Department, through their union, that staff, especially doctors and nurses were working impossible hours and that the situation was long unsustainable even before the influx of influenza over the New Year, let alone afterwards.

The government keeps telling us that the situation has improved, but the people on the delivery end then tell the media the situation is far from normalised. This is the same government that took more than 10 years to build the hospital, then spent the next years boasting this was a state-of-the-art hospital (which it is, in equipment) before it became evident to one and all that there are still long queues for operations, that the management of information flows sometimes still suffers from hiccups, and that when the normal New Year bouts of influenza kick in, the hospital finds it is far too small for requirements.

Let us all assume that things are improving and that the problems are being ironed out. Let us also assume that most of the patients and their families are satisfied with the care they receive. Even so, all the spin about healthcare and state-of-the-art hospital care flies out the window when people find out their relatives do not get what people have been led to expect from this new hospital – a new and better level of care from the old St Luke’s.

Some problems are the result of decisions that are now proving to have been the wrong decisions. It was thus the wrong decision to even conceive of an oncology department elsewhere and it was quite the right decision to go for an oncology department on campus.

It was the wrong decision to go for a smaller hospital even though this decision was underpinned by a determination to push social cases out of the wards as soon as they could. Anybody could have told the decision-makers this was a forlorn hope. In fact, the social case syndrome is still with us. Besides, in a day and age when people are living longer, and also when the population is slowly growing, it simply makes no sense to even conceive that we would be needing less hospital beds, although it is quite true that today’s medical progress has made stays in bed shorter in post-operational periods.

And then it was simply and totally wrong not to raise the hospital by a further storey when there was still this possibility, as was the decision not to go for alternative energy with the addition of solar panels considering all that expanse of a roof.

The hospital administration is under continuous pressure because of staffing issues. While the packages of doctors, consultants et al has been improved, there is a looming lack of nurses despite the government’s frantic effort not just to increase the training of new nurses, to re-recruit nurses who have stopped working and to bring in nurses from abroad. One cannot understand how while the hospital took its own sweet time to get built, no one seems to have sat down and studied what human resources would a modern, state-of-the-art hospital as big as this require in staffing terms.

This winter’s disgraceful scenes must not be repeated. There is a limit how much people can take and that limit is quite a long way behind us now.