It is always said that the health sector should not be a political football and that instead there should be a concerted effort by all the parties concerned to bring it as close to perfection as possible. There is nothing more important than health. But in spite of all the good intentions, anything that has to do with this sector always leads to controversies, mostly because the stakeholders seek to protect their own turf and the administrators try to please everyone to end up pleasing no-one.
The health sector, including Mater Dei Hospital, had its issues to deal with under the previous administration, issues that have not gone away with the change of government. The problems that existed a year ago are still there today. There is still a shortage of medicines, patients are still being kept in corridors before they are taken to wards and it still sometimes takes hours to receive some kind of treatment in the Emergency Department. The difference is that the shortcomings are now being reported by Net TV, and not One News.
The John Dalli report has continued to stir the pot of controversy these past few days. Most of all, it has angered the unions, who have described it as confrontational and deliberately negative. The government is trying hard to keep the lid on by distancing itself from the outcome, refusing to take ownership of what was written.
The first question that arises is why the government chose to appoint a former health minister coming from the opposite political camp, who left the job to take up a post in Brussels from which he resigned over serious allegations, to carry out a report on such a delicate issue.
Maybe the government saw it as an opportunity to find fault with the previous government in a sector vehemently attacked by the Labour Party before the election. Who better than John Dalli, with an axe to grind against the Nationalists, to do the job, Labour must have thought.
But the situation is now backfiring on the government. The report has unsettled the sector to such an extent that the two unions representing doctors and nurses are thinking of taking drastic action if the report’s recommendations are implemented by the government. John Dalli has succeeded where others failed. Through his report, he has managed to bring the doctors and nurses– who are usually at loggerheads over various issues pertaining to their conditions of work – together in one common front. This unity will make them stronger.
Both the Medical Association of Malta and the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses have blasted the report, and now they share a common enemy. This enemy, however, is not John Dalli, who was simply commissioned to draw up the report and make it public. He is not politically responsible for its implementation, and so it is the government that gave him the task that must face the music. And this is why the government has made it a point to say that it does not take ownership of the report.
The government has found itself between a rock and a hard place. It cannot shoot down a report that it commissioned (for the wrong reasons, perhaps) and at the same time it cannot endorse it as this it would push it towards a direct confrontation with the people who, ultimately, are responsible for the most important aspect of running a hospital – the doctors and the nurses.
My reading of it is that the government is regretting the choice it made to have John Dalli named as consultant to the health minister and have him draw up such a report. At the time Prime Minister Joseph Muscat made the decision, it appeared as being a blow below the belt aimed at the Nationalists and an opportunity to put them in bad light. But this did not happen; if anything, appointing John Dalli as a consultant did not help raise the image of the minister responsible, Godfrey Farrugia.
The way matters developed made it even worse, because now the government must address a situation that can get out of hand. The John Dalli report may have been intended to hurt the PN, but it has come back to haunt the government instead, because the outcome is that the doctors and nurses are seeing it as a direct attack against them.
The PN has hardly been touched by the report, although several of the shortcomings listed started under its administration. It is watching the situation from afar, as whatever happens it can always take advantage from a political point of view. The idea, coming from its own spokesman Claudio Grech, to set up a parliamentary committee to tackle health has been welcomed. Perhaps the PN should have proposed and implemented it when it was in government. To be fair, Mr Grech did not form part of the PN parliamentary group at the time, but it must be said that it is easy to come up with ideas from the Opposition benches.
To go back to the John Dalli report, the government is now playing for time by saying that two committees will be set up to analyse it. This is a clear indication that the government is not comfortable. It is quite unusual, if not unprecedented, to have a report drawn up, and then have two committees established to analyse its findings. But whatever final decision is taken, the government risks a backlash.
If it discards the report, it will be a political victory for the Nationalist Party in its war of words with both the former minister and the government. If, on the other hand, the government goes for its implementation, it will further upset the unions with the result that there will be instability in such a delicate sector.
It will not be easy to find a compromise.
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