Health Minister Jo Etienne Abela defended the government’s handling of the situation at Mater Dei Hospital on Monday, highlighting significant progress in reducing long-term care patient backlogs and addressing waiting times at the Emergency Department.
Speaking in Parliament, Abela also responded to criticism from the Medical Association of Malta (MAM) over the outsourcing of emergency cases to private hospitals.
He said that over the past year, the government’s focus on tackling long-term care needs had dramatically reduced the number of patients, mainly elderly, taking up beds at Mater Dei.
“Usually, we had 150 to 200 patients waiting for this type of care. Now, in winter, this number has become insignificant,” he said, adding, “We have decreased the number from around 100 to less than 20.”
He attributed this improvement to arrangements made with care homes, including St Vincent de Paul, to free up hospital beds for emergency and acute cases.
The minister also outlined measures to alleviate pressure on emergency services, including outsourcing non-complicated cases to private hospitals and restructuring the process at Mater Dei to ensure that senior medical staff were the first point of contact for patients in emergency situations. Abela said the latter proposal had the support of the opposition’s shadow health minister.
Abela acknowledged ongoing concerns about waiting times in Mater Dei’s emergency department, sharing a complaint he had received from a father whose daughter had waited over 15 hours to be seen by a medical professional. However, he stressed that long waiting times are not unique to Malta.
Referring to similar challenges faced by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), Abela cited British media reports about patients dying in hospital corridors due to severe overcrowding. “We would be detached from reality as a government not to notice what’s happening in our country and what’s even worse happening abroad,” he said.
Despite this, Abela insisted that his ministry was taking proactive steps to improve the situation and avoid further deterioration.
Turning to the ongoing dispute with MAM, Abela rejected claims that the union had not been informed about plans to outsource emergency services to private hospitals. He listed several instances of consultation, including initially speaking with the union on February 27, a presentation given to the union in May and the publication of a tender in July.
“It’s not true we don’t want to be transparent,” Abela said, adding that MAM’s criticism resembled that of “a newspaper of the opposition.”
MAM president Martin Balzan had previously told Times of Malta that the union had been “completely in the dark” on how the partnership with private hospitals would work, claiming that no proper consultation had taken place.