Last Sunday, this paper carried a report which said that a number of elderly patients had been transferred to St Vincent de Paule Residence for the elderly in such a bad state of health that a number of them died shortly afterwards.
Ten patients were transferred from Mater Dei Hospital and Karen Grech Rehabilitation Hospital on a Sunday. One of the patients, a 98-year old woman died within 24 hours, and in another case an 82-year old woman who had been admitted to the home died on the same day.
Such transfers have happened before. In one of the cases, one of the patients was unresponsive when transferred to SVDP.
The sources who spoke to this paper claimed that those who had taken the decisions knew that these patients had hours to live but they moved them anyway. "It is beyond sick," the sources commented.
On Tuesday evening in Parliament, while he was replying to questions, Minister Michael Farrugia got involved in this issue, even though the paper had sent questions to Parliamentary Secretary Justyne Caruana on this issue that were left unanswered.
Instead of passing the buck or kicking the can upwards or sideways, Minister Farrugia entered the fray, rhetorically asking if he had the gift of prophecy and knows when someone is about to die.
By replying in this way, the minister put himself in the centre of the issue as if he was the one who had authorized the transfers and maybe had even chosen the patients to be transferred.
There are at least four ministers/parliamentary secretaries involved, from Minister Konrad Mizzi to parliamentary secretaries Chris Fearn and Dr Caruana, apart from Minister Farrugia - the demarcation lines are not clear between them.
Just before this exchange, Minister Farrugia had admitted to making a 'cardinal mistake' in his previous stint as minister (for health in the 1996-1998 Cabinet) when patients were transferred to SVDP only from St Luke's Hospital with the predictable result that all those who wanted to be admitted to SVDP (or their families) were (them) recovered at St Luke's thus crowding out all those who had been registering to enter SVDP from the community.
He called this a 'cardinal mistake' but did not seem to think that whoever had moved clearly weak and fragile patients had not committed a 'cardinal mistake'.
I don't want to put the blame entirely on Minister Farrugia's back for everyone knows that for a patient to be released from hospital there's a lot of paperwork to be done and signed.
Clearly, in these wet and cold weeks there must have been a huge demand for beds at Mater Dei and a corresponding pressure to free all those beds that could be freed and send those for whom staying at Mater Dei would not perceivably improve matters, to a rest home like SVDP.
But I ask myself, what if the person being transferred was a relative of the minister, or of an MP, would that be allowed? Hence the suspicion that those who were transferred were either catatonic or fragile elderly people with no one to fight their corner. Despite all assurances to the contrary, isn't this feebleness and lack of support what led to those long lines of elderly on their way to the furnaces?
My memory flips to, I think, Minister Farrugia's previous stint (although, if it did happen under his remit, he personally had nothing to do with it - it's just the timeline I am speaking about) when my late mother was recovering in a Medical Ward at St Luke's. The degrading treatment she received at the hands of the Nursing Aides (those in a brown uniform) got me so crazed with anger that I, an editor then, wrote a Letter to the Editor (ie to myself) to protest at the treatment - being kept in a ward that included a patient who screamed and screamed night and day, and, when my mother implored them to change her ward, she was given another bed in a different hall but made to carry the bedclothes herself - she was 83 years old.
Years later, I wrote an article gently criticizing the way the relocation of the ITU had been carried out from St Luke's to Mater Dei and was, for my sins, loudly and volubly harangued right in the middle of the Prime Minister's Christmas drinks at Castille as one who knows nothing and who should have kept his mouth shut.
Again, in this case, as also in the case of our story last Sunday, we were not relaying concern or anger expressed by relatives of the patients but concern expressed by bystanders or people involved in the issue.
The relocation to Mater Dei took place, if I remember correctly, in November during a cold spell. The transfer to SVDP took place in one of the coldest winters in decades. Being transferred from Mater Dei's AC halls to SVDP with a different eco-climate must have been traumatic, let alone the different handling by staffs.
There is in all this, as well as the indignity of patients massed together in corridors turned into wards at the Emergency Department with no privacy or dignity, a priority given to other considerations than to ensure each patient, regardless of status, gets proper and appropriate care. To get beds freed up is a consideration but not at the expense of ill treating patients because they are old and frail and possibly have no one to look after them (and to exert pressure on the staff and defend their relatives from such treatment).
'Maledetta la vecchiaia' goes the adage, especially if you are all alone and in a fragile state of health.
In this country, where we have an Ombudsman for everything, we seem to have neglected having an Ombudsman for the Elderly who maybe can stop this sort of treatment (or ill-treatment) that goes on and on.
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