Top cardiologist Albert Fenech dies at 70

The heart surgeon Albert Fenech, a former Nationalist MP, has passed away at the age of 70.

The cardiologist was found dead inside his house and is believed to have died of natural causes.

A doctor who spent more than two decades overseas, Fenech had a brief foray in politics as a Nationalist Party MP between 2013 and 2016. He resigned to take up a job with Vitals Global Healthcare, the company handed a concession to run three state hospitals.

Fenech co-founded the cardiology department within local public healthcare in 1995 along with fellow cardiologist Alex Manche, and carried out the very first operation at Mater Dei Hospital – an angiogram – in 2007.

“I left Malta in 1975 and I never thought I’d be coming back,” he told MaltaToday in 2007.

At the time there used to be two cardiologists who were invited over to come and see patients in Malta, for two weeks a year each. “The government then changed and in 1988 I got a call to be one of the cardiologists to visit Malta. So I started coming over and it was quite obvious that things weren’t that good, because there were four of us who would come over – so for eight weeks of the year there was a resident interventional cardiologist on the island, and the rest of the time people had to get well enough to be able to fly to the UK, which of course wasn’t always possible.”

He said he was ashamed that Maltese patients had to be funded by the State to visit him in London. He relocated to Malta with a drastic cut in salary to set up the cardiology department at St Luke’s Hospital. “There’s more to life than money, and in fact that’s why I get very angry when members of the profession make it sound as if all they’re interested in is money over here. Medicine is above that. I may be old-fashioned, I may be idealistic, but I put that into practice. I came over here and I’m proud that not one single patient has had to go abroad since we started,” he had said.

Fenech called himself a great believer in the national health service, but he regretted political attempts at weaponising free healthcare. “When they put 50c for drugs that would have cost you Lm25 to buy, it was made into a political thing. Oh yes we’ll take it off. And then? What are you left with? The health service should remain out of the political arena. It’s used as a football too many times,” he said in 2007.

“Because we’re used to it being completely free, there was an idea some time ago that people should put at the bottom of medical reports the cost of whatever the intervention cost. The pace-makers we use today can cost up to Lm14,000. I don’t think people realise that. When something is free you don’t realise its value.”

Fenech rued the Maltese vulnerability to heart disease and diabetes. “Although we’re a Mediterranean country for many years we did not benefit from the Mediterranean diet, because we were a British protectorate so we had the British diet and everyone knows it’s one of the worst diets in the world.”

He continued to be one of Mater Dei Hospital’s top cardiologists until 2015, when he was unceremoniously told not to keep working at Mater Dei Hospital beyond pensionable age, in a strict application of employment rules that baffled patients and sections of the medical community alike.

Fenech had then said he was “practically being removed over personal pique and political decisions”, after having filed a judicial protest against the parliamentary secretary for health for being forced into part-time work in breach of policy.

“I was first stopped from carrying out the very surgical procedures I introduced to Malta and which I taught to new surgeons… and then they reduced the number of operations I could do from two daily to one, until I was completely stopped. I feel insulted and hurt,” Prof. Fenech had said.

VGH’s plans to have Fenech run new cardiac units within St Luke’s and Gozo General Hospital never materialised. Only last week, Fenech said the plan was “another white elephant” and that the hospitals deal had “bamboozled” people.