The government this past week announced new plans for the country’s healthcare system, revolving around Mater Dei Hospital and restructuring the hospital in order to create 600 new beds in the long-term by moving other services to a newly rehabilitated St Luke’s Hospital.
The three most pressing matters identified by the government to address are the emergency waiting time, total bed status, and the bed status in the ITU department.
Several services currently offered at Mater Dei will, by time, be transferred to St Luke’s Hospital campus, with the plans for regenerating St Luke’s set to be presented later this year. The emergency department will be infrastructurally expanded, while administrative staff will be moved to what was the HSBC Call Centre in Swatar close by.
The plan, which was exclusively revealed by The Malta Independent on Sunday earlier in May, is certainly well-needed and it does appear to be well thought out and realistic in its aims and timeframes.
It does however betray the lack of planning that there has been for the healthcare sector in the past decade of a Labour government.
First and foremost, the irony that the announce came the same week we saw former and even current high-ranking figures of the Labour government – including the former Prime Minister – appear in court to hear charges against them in relation to a hospitals concession which was ultimately deemed to be fraudulent for the first time is not lost on anyone.
One of the hospitals in that concession – St Luke’s Hospital – is a key part of the government’s new plans. But the facility cannot be used before it is extensively restored and rehabilitated – something which was meant to be done by the private concessionaires who were paid to invest in and operate it.
As it turned out, neither the company with zero medical background Vitals Global Healthcare or their successors, the ‘real deal’ Steward Health Care went as close as lifting a finger to doing anything concerning St Luke’s Hospital.
Imagine had this had been planned realistically from the outset, how much better our healthcare system would be today and how much more efficient public spending would have been.
There is something to be said about public spending efficiency as well within this context.
A part of the plan is the phased closure of Mount Carmel Hospital, with new Health Minister Jo Etienne Abela believing that the facility is simply not fit for purpose and also that the stigma against the place and mental health issues would be removed if services were centralised at Mater Dei Hospital.
That’s certainly a line of thinking one can get behind, but it comes after the Labour government spent millions of euros to rehabilitate certain wards – spending which now perhaps jars a bit with the decision to close the facility.
Likewise, spending on plans for a new outpatients department – for a long time deemed as one of the main solutions for expanding Mater Dei Hospital – take on a different context now that those plans have been shelved.
Perhaps had there been better planning – or a better roadmap, if you like – from the get go then the government would have been proactive, rather than reactive as it is today when it comes to this sector.