When I was younger and unsure what to do with the rest of my life (my bid to be the first Eurovision-winning prime minister was thankfully rubbished very early on), I was taught the importance of loving whatever job I ended up doing. My generation wasn’t really given much guidance but we were taught about vocation. I remember teaching and nursing being particularly highlighted as vocational professions; sadly, we continue to struggle to have enough contenders in either field. Sadly and inevitably.
Malta is, once again, facing a nurse shortage and, instead of pulling out all the stops and making the profession more attractive with perhaps better salaries and more perks, we are doing what has become something of a tradition in this country: staring straight at the problem, making a fuss for all of two minutes and then literally transferring our waning attention to the next disaster waiting in the wings.
Just a couple of days ago, a judge upheld the arguments made by the Malta Union for Midwives and Nurses (MUMN) that the directives the union had issued to its members would not compromise the care that patients got but were targeting critical staff shortage. So far, the health ministry is yet to find a solution to this problem that has endured for years and years, leaving more and more nurses feeling fed up and burnt out and doing little to encourage fresh faces into the sector.
When we import nurses, they leave for greener pastures when they can because we are not giving them an adequate reason to stay- Anna Marie Galea
What makes all of this so much worse is the current circulating news items about the elderly man who simply walked out of St Vincent de Paul Residence at three in the morning and is yet to be found and an elderly lady who fell a storey-and-a-half off a balcony at the same residence just a few days later and is currently fighting for her life. On the day that Karmenu Fino went missing, the MUMN reported that only one nurse had been assigned to a ward hosting 35 patients when there should have at least been two.
It honestly beggars belief that this is what our healthcare system has come to. How is one nurse meant to cater to the needs of over 35 people, many of whom need a lot of hands-on assistance? How are they meant to literally be at 35 bedsides at once? We don’t even have classrooms that are that big. How can we then blame the nurse when something unfortunate happens? It’s all very well to point fingers but the truth is that staff shortages in the sector have been discussed repeatedly, with little to no progress being made. Even when we import nurses, they leave for greener pastures when they can because we are not giving them an adequate reason to stay.
It has been clear for some time that this situation cannot go on, especially since it is now literally costing us lives. The MUMN needs to be taken seriously by the authorities and intelligent conversations need to start being had about how our ageing and growing population can be adequately catered to. We can’t continue to heap responsibility on those in caring professions and expect them to just put up with it because this is their chosen life. Our nurses deserve better – we deserve better.