Nurses are planning to walk out of Mount Carmel Hospital over what their union says is lack of safety and unbearable temperatures inside several wards, where air conditioners have seized up.
If the strike action goes ahead on Wednesday, it would severely hamper the operation of the mental health hospital.
However, in replies to questions from Times of Malta, the health authorities on Monday evening said they expect to repair the AC units on Tuesday.
It is not certain if the nurses’ union, MUMN, will follow through on their planned action if this is done.
The union claims its calls for the repair of air-conditioning units have fallen on deaf ears and nurses will only return to work once the repairs are completed.
Monday morning it told its members it had given the authorities enough time to carry out the repairs and instructed nurses to leave their wards at 9am. The most senior nurse will remain inside the wards in case of emergencies.
Sources said that in most of the wards, the air-conditioning units have not worked for several weeks, leaving workers unable to function properly in such conditions.
The heatwaves that recently hit the island have made the situation even more agonising, leading to exhaustion and workers being taken ill at work, the union claims.
When contacted, MUMN president Paul Pace said the union had tried on several occasions to bring the matter to the attention of hospital management “but it is clear that such neglected wards seem to be abandoned even by management”.
Safety is another issue. Mr Pace said that in one particular ward, the male ward 3B, the ceiling was in such a bad state that it was full of supports. As if this was not enough, all six air-conditioning units were non-functional.
“The ward is literally an incubator,” he said, adding that no one seemed to be accountable for such a disastrous situation.
To make matters worse, the hospital has run out of hand-wash soap, kitchen rolls, soap to wash patients and even fruit concentrate to add to patients’ water. The situation has persisted for more than three weeks, Mr Pace said.
“There is a limit to everything in life and that limit has been reached at Mount Carmel Hospital. It is crisis management on a day-to-day.”
Former hospital chief operations officer Paul Dalli recently told Parliament that patients had been made to endure freezing cold showers in the height of winter because there was no hot water for months on end. The hospital, he complained, had been left to rot.