A vision that brings together innovation and accountability in health administration and healthcare institutions is long overdue.
Despite multiple renewed promises to renovate St Luke’s Hospital complex, the decade’s worth of inertia across departments to begin works attests that refurbishment is either too costly, not feasible or not a priority.
Rehabilitating the national rehabilitation hospital is undeniably one of the country’s most significant and urgent challenges. Until interim work is done, patients would be transferred to refurbished wards at St Luke’s Hospital or another institution. Another option is to build a new hospital from scratch nearby.
The same mantra applies to all other buildings in place since the 1990s. The ex-outpatients administrative block at St Luke’s Hospital, the Blood Donation Centre, the Child and Young People’s Services, Mount Carmel Hospital, the Child Development and Assessment Unit, the Health Promotion Department, the Centre for Procurement and Supplies Unit, and the Directorate for Health Information and Research have remained the same except for minor, much-needed facelifts made out of bare necessity.
If St Luke’s complex cannot be used as a hospital, it should be used as office space to centralise the Ministry of Health’s operations. This would bring the departments closer together, boost much-needed morale for civil servants, and improve efficiency.
Karin Grech Hospital has been in a dilapidated state for years, to the detriment of patients and families. Water leaks from unsafe ceilings, patrons risk their safety using electrical outlets, substandard equipment is used to care for patients, and the floors feel unstable when walked on.
Patients are left feeling unsafe, and professionals remain helpless with low morale, doing the best they can. It is in an unending state of disrepair.
The neighbouring ex-medical school is similarly neglected, while the main hospital has become a roost for pigeons. Broken windows and doors allow animals and natural elements to hasten the structure’s decline. A refurbishment to provide healthcare services is likely no longer an option.
Generations have gone through Karin Grech Hospital’s corridors to see their grandparents being cared for in such conditions after suffering a broken hip or stroke. A sight that shocks the senses. I sometimes wonder why we have left patients in this building for so long.
In the ex-outpatient building, the Office of the Superintendence of Public Health sits with a full view of the constant accumulating degradation, cognisant that the rehabilitation centre is likely no longer fit for purpose. As staff sign in and out metres away, the shadow of St Luke’s Hospital bears down on the superintendence as if to remind it of its moral responsibility to maintain the complex’s healthcare standards.
The superintendence itself is also not immune from a tradition that is tolerant of functioning in a similarly run-down building. The offices speak for themselves, with cramped rooms and similar issues to Karin Grech Hospital.
Top brass should be replaced for incompetence and not speaking up- Ian Baldacchino
It’s time to ask ourselves some hard questions. Have we become so institutionalised as a country that we tolerate a substandard rehabilitation infrastructure? Is this really the best we can do for our most vulnerable citizens? Are we so far out of options?
It seems no one wants to stub the toes of health departments that are ineffective in delivering needed changes, overburdened with multiple priorities, and too inflexible in their practices.
People should be on the streets about this. Hard interviews should be sought with the commissioner for older persons and responsible departments, asking for explanations as to why the neglect persists.
Top brass should be replaced for incompetence and not speaking up. People should cringe when they remember that the government’s only repeated advocacy was for considering a change in the law favouring the introduction of euthanasia in this culture of passivity.
Perhaps the other reason that NGOs and the government fail the frail elderly and similar groups is that they are not considered relevant if they don’t participate in a socialist economy, they don’t complain or unionise, they don’t vote or fund state political parties, and they do not have effective safeguards. Marxism par excellence fit for a socialist dystopia of the 1950s.
Politics appears to be the only priority, with NGOs more preoccupied with militating against corruption and for the environment. There is a net benefit for those concerned, but when it comes to dignity of the sick elderly, who are in constant need of attention and cannot reciprocate with love or beauty, we lose interest. Thankfully professionals espouse deeper interests expressed in their codes of ethics; otherwise, no one would work in hospitals.
The government’s approach to investing in its buildings is also perplexing. It incentivises private endeavours for construction but freezes up when it comes to erecting new hospitals.
Works have been promised so many times that enthusiasm has jaded. Criticism that Mater Dei Hospital took over a decade to finish no longer seems surprising, considering that at least work started at some point.
The electorate’s amazement for the new hospitals will be reserved for when work actually starts. The only praise will be in prayers that have finally been heard.
Ian Baldacchino is a specialist in family medicine.