The number of nurses and midwives in Malta has more than doubled since 2011, fresh figures have confirmed. 

In data released to mark International Nurses’ Day on Tuesday, Eurostat, the EU statistics office, revealed that in 2019, there were 6,180 nurses and midwives in Malta. 

The number shot up from 2,832 in 2011, the data shows.

According to the statistics office, at an increase of 0.7 percentage points, in relative terms Malta recorded the highest increase in the share of nurses in total employment between the nine years under review.

The share of nurses and midwives in the total workforce was 2.2 per cent in the EU in 2019, with the rate in Malta being slightly higher at 2.4 per cent. The island’s rate was the same as in France, Sweden and Denmark. 

Nurses’ Day is celebrated each year on May 12 to coincide with the anniversary of Florence Nightingale's birth in 1820.

While 2020 will go down in history as the year the world battled the coronavirus pandemic, it is also the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife, a year-long effort to celebrate the work of nurses and midwives. It will also serve to highlight the challenging conditions nurses often face, and advocate for increased investments in the nursing and midwifery workforce.

Malta's healthcare workers have received heaps of praise as the country battles the coronavirus outbreak. Many poeple even came together while at home to honour front-liners by playing the national anthem in their street, clapping and even hanging posters and banners with words of praise.

Nurses’ union pays tribute to ‘heroes’

In a statement, the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses said it wanted to pay tribute to “heroes who made their ultimate sacrifice to care for their patients”, referring to healthcare workers abroad who died after contracting COVID-19 while on duty. 

“Malta was one of the luckiest countries where the partial lockdown and contact tracing worked well and the famous spike of cases did not occur," it said.

Other countries were not so lucky and several lives were lost since hospitals were unable to cope with the huge number of cases, the union lamented. 

It urged the public to remain vigilant and follow the health authorities’ instructions as the risk of the virus spreading “is still there”. 

“We as a nation cannot afford to let our guard down so quickly,” it said.