Updated 5.05pm - PN statement
The Gozo, St Luke’s and Karin Grech hospitals will formally transition to their new private owners over the next two months, Vitals Global Healthcare announced today.
The company that was chosen as the preferred bidder in June last year for the public-private partnership will be injecting €220 million in a total revamp of the three hospitals.
During a media briefing held today, Ram Tumuluri, a director of VGH, said the concession was for 30 years and the capital injection would be made over the next two years.
VGH has roped in Partners Healthcare International, a US-based company that runs hospitals, to take care of the operational side.
Health Minister Chris Fearne was also present for the briefing. Gynaecologist Mark Brincat and cardiologist Albert Fenech, who were engaged by VGH to head speciality departments were also present.
Mr Fearne said all current employees at the three facilities would remain on the public payroll, enjoying the conditions outlined in their respective collective agreements. He said they will remain government employees and any future talks with unions on collective agreements would be handled by the government.
The three facilities currently employ 1,600 people and VGH is projecting this would increase to 2,400. Additional employees would be on VGH’s payroll.
Under the agreement reached last March, the government would buy a number of beds to be used by the public healthcare service from VGH. The company, however, will also attract medical tourism to the island.
An artist's impression of the revamped St Luke's hospital.
Mr Fearne said Maltese patients sent to the hospitals as part of the national health service would not pay. He insisted there will be no difference in the medical treatment or bedside services offered to patients, irrespective of whether they were paying foreign nationals or Maltese patients occupying beds bought by the government.
Mr Fearne did not say how much the government would be paying for the beds it would buy from VGH, adding that for the next two years the expense was not expected to be more than what the government already pays to run the hospitals.
The contracts signed between VGH and the government have not been published but Mr Fearne said they would be submitted in Parliament after the summer recess.
The project will see the erection of a new Gozo hospital with 450 beds. Of these, 250 will be acute beds and 200 for geriatric and long term cases.
VGH said the total number of beds available for Maltese patients in Gozo would be 350.
Mr Tumuluri said the Gozo hospital would also have the potential of adding 100 beds in the future. The hospital grounds will also include the Barts medical school, which should be opening its doors in September 2017.
He said the Gozo hospital investment should see the number of new jobs in Gozo alone increasing by between 400 and 600.
St Luke’s Hospital, which will undergo extensive refurbishment works to transform the existing wards into single or double-bed rooms, will have 350 beds – 150 rehabilitation and 200 acute medical care.
Karin Grech will have 320 beds, which will all be contracted by the government to be used for geriatric care.
St Luke’s will also house a nursing school, a joint venture between MCAST and Northumbria University.
Mr Tumuluri also introduced the Stephen Zammit, who will be CEO for Karin Grech and St Luke’s and Nadine Delicata, the CEO for the Gozo hospital.
The chief executive running the VGH Malta operation will be physician Armin Ernst, the former CEO of Reliant Medical Group.
'Publish the contracts' - PN
In a reaction, the Nationalist Party said that the government's reluctance to publish the contracts it had signed with Vitals was "very suspicious."
It said that, now that the deal had been struck, there was no reason to keep the contracts secret.
The PN argued that the deal was negotiated by Minister without Portfolio Konrad Mizzi and the Prime Minister's chief of staff Keith Schembri - the two key local political figures named in the Panama Papers leak.
Their involvement in this deal, the PN said, raised suspicions about VGH director Mr Tumuluri, given that he had "no previous experience of managing hospitals."
Workers and patients, the party said, had been left in a state of uncertainty. "The PN believes that the health sector should never be put at risk, like the government is doing with these shady deals," it said.