On Saturday 6 August, the health minister, Chris Fearne, announced an “overhaul of Gozo health services” through the introduction of a permanent ambulance service, linking the Gozo hospital to St Luke’s.  At face value this sounds like a great idea. All new initiatives which improve the health services in Malta and Gozo are obviously always welcome.

But there is something very odd about this announcement.

The media reported Fearne saying that the actual service will commence once the helicopter is converted into a fully equipped air ambulance. So the service will actually be introduced later on this year.

This week, however, we got to know that this government has no immediate plans to build a new helipad at Mater Dei Hospital. That means this service, which is entirely in the hands of the private concessionaire Vitals Global Healthcare (VGH), will operate strictly from Gozo to St Luke’s. Not Mater Dei.  Patients will be transferred to Mater Dei by (road) ambulance.

Many experts who work in the medical field, particularly those in Accident and Emergency, see this move as a gimmick. Others do not consider it to be a priority. Obvious questions arise.

Once there already was a very good service being offered by the Armed Forces of Malta, was the introduction of this service a priority? If it is a priority, can we know the priorities that are ranked before and after having this helicopter?

Will the government be paying VGH every time a patient is brought to Malta? How much will each trip cost? Is the cost for this helicopter part of the €55 million which the Maltese government will be paying annually for the healthcare deal?

I have heard that nobody in government bothered to inform the Accident and Emergency department at Mater Dei Hospital about the introduction of this service. Nor did they inform the Armed Forces of Malta, for that matter.

This is, to put it mildly, strange: the helicopter service must work hand in hand with the national health and security services for obvious reasons.

Rumour has it that, before it is converted, the helicopter will be used to transport investors who will be brought over to support the VGH project... since the full sum promised by Joseph Muscat and Konrad Mizzi (€220 million) has in fact not been raised yet.

Is this why Chris Fearne announced that there will be test flights? Otherwise what need is there for them? A second-hand helicopter registered in Qatar does not need test flights. It obviously worked very well in Qatar, or was it Corfu?

Chris Fearne is definitely not one to reveal more than he intends to when addressing the press. This is why I found one of his comments to the Sunday Times (7th August 2016) particularly striking. He clarified that his (Fearne’s) involvement in the deal with VGH was strictly in the “medical elements”. This of course implies that the financial deal, which Chris Fearne promised to reveal in Parliament in October, after the summer recess, was struck by Konrad Mizzi.

Ah, so Fearne wants to clarify that this is yet another Mizzi deal. So that if we are faced with some surprise in the autumn, he is not to blame: like Pontius Pilate he can wash his hands of any wrongdoing. Perhaps this is also why he is keeping very busy this summer announcing projects and initiatives which have absolutely nothing to do with the privatization initiative.

Of course we all know that building a new permanent helipad at Mater Dei before introducing the new helicopter service from Gozo would have made more sense, medically speaking. We must therefore conclude that this does not seem to be Chris Fearne’s decision because he is working strictly on the “medical elements.”

Can we then conclude that the helicopter service is, sadly, another expensive gimmick?