Allow me to start with a personal recollection. In the world of paediatric surgery, London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children is the ‘Mecca’. I was lucky enough to have done a stint there. The second best is Alder Hey in Liverpool where I was working previously. Nervous and edgy before my interview at Great Ormond, I had a chat with one of my professors in Liverpool. He raised a question that stayed with me as one of life’s simplest but deepest lessons.
“Why is Great Ormond Street the best paediatric hospital in the world?” he asked in that typically subdued English way.
The obvious answer was that Great Ormond Street attracts the best paediatric surgeons from all four corners of the globe. Indeed, 90 per cent of its doctors and consultants are not British. Sure enough, when I went for my interview, I was flanked by contenders from New Zealand, Canada, the US and Australia. Only one of us got the job.
Moral of the story: Great Ormond is the world’s best paediatric hospital because it attracts the best in the world; and it attracts the best because it’s the best.
It stays at the top because it is a magnet for those who are tops. Simple.
Shoulder to shoulder with my Prime Minister, we are daring to take this lesson to politics. We aim to be the best in Europe and the world. That’s the bar we are setting for ourselves, not the average or, less so, the also-rans.
How are we trying to get there?
For all our faults, the Labour Party has been at its best when it was true to its mission to be the party of change
Fiercely cosmopolitan, we are setting our sights and welcoming top-notch people with cutting edge skills in various fields, both homegrown and foreign.
We are not there yet but we are on the way to becoming a centre of excellence.
Great Ormond is in sight, as it were. This medical parallel brings me to a shining example of this radical, and radically ambitious, way of setting our national goals.
What is the value of bringing over Barts Medical School? For starters, we already have 50 students, soon to become 200-300 in the coming years, studying in Gozo and contributing to its economy. But the real breakthrough is that Barts is probably the best medical school in Europe, if not the world. It attracts lecturers, doctors and researchers of global standing who in turn will make our reputation soar and attract more people. The Liverpool professor’s advice is becoming a reality in Malta.
This is our vision and where we want to go. Although recruiting low-skilled staff is a challenge, the key to unlock our future is in the hands of the highly-skilled in various fields, academics, knowledge workers, people who contribute ideas, innovate and add value to make us the best.
Contrary to the scaremongering being peddled by the Opposition, we welcome foreign workers because we know that they add to our, to everyone’s, quality of life. To be the best we need the best minds, whatever passport they carry in their pocket. And the best benefit the rest.
Obviously, for this transformational change to happen we need to up our infrastructural game to cater for it – better hospitals, better roads, better schools, better everything.
Does the government have to do it all?
No, most of it should be privately driven or in partnership with it. For instance, we will get more high-end private schools when there are more high-end students to go to them. We’ve started it, it’s growing and we welcome it.
Let’s face it, for all our faults, the Labour Party has been at its best when it was true to its mission to be the party of change. When we fostered change, not when we had no choice but to accept it. It is this mission that is once again driving us forward today.
Chris Fearne is Deputy Prime Minister.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece