Ministry office at Mater Dei? Fine, but it won’t solve real problems…

Doctors have generally responded warmly to the enthusiasm of new Health Minister Godfrey Farrugia, whose first decision upon assuming the health portfolio last week was to announce the setting up of an office at the heart of the Accident & Emergency department of Mater Dei Hospital.

Farrugia made the announcement in an interview with sister newspaper Illum last Sunday.

"This way, I will be able to see better how this department operates every day," he said.

Farrugia plans to visit Mater Dei Hospital on a daily basis, where he would spend a maximum of 12 hours a day. However, it is debatable whether this innovative approach will have any real effect on the existing problems in that particular department.

Earlier today morning, Farrugia said on TVAM that his ministry was suffering from a €63 million deficit and that upon taking 'office' inside Mater Dei he found 1,000 referral applications for appointments in 2014 which had not even been issued yet. Farrugia is mulling the option of keeping the outpatients ward open between 4pm and 8pm, as well as implementing a €90,000 measure to have a 'second' parent flown with their children when they are seeking cancer treatment overseas

Martin Balzan, president of the Medical Association of Malta, welcomes the fact that the new minister has prioritised the casualty department. However, he points out that the department itself may not be the source of all the problems affecting its efficiency at the moment.

Balzan argues that if problems in other sectors (namely, primary healthcare and care of the elderly) are not also addressed, the situation in the A&E department at Mater Dei will not improve.

"Casualty is a priority, definitely. But the problems being experienced at casualty are not necessarily caused at the department itself."

Giving the analogy of a traffic accident in Marsa that may cause a traffic jam in the Santa Venera tunnels, Balzan explains that many of the daily problems faced at casualty will have arisen from failures or shortcomings experienced at other parts of the system.

"There are two major factors contributing to the existing problems in A&E," he said. "The first is that the primary healthcare system is often by-passed altogether, so that many people go straight to casualty when they can easily be treated by their family doctors or at the health centres..

"A second factor concerns a bottleneck caused by problems in the geriatric care sector. Elderly patients awaiting to be transferred to homes for the elderly, or to rehab facilities, result in a lack of bedspace currently experienced at Mater Dei."

Balzan argues that this leads to difficulties in finding space for patients admitted through the emergency department, with consequent delays and inconvenience to patients.

Balzan acknowledges that neither of these problems is easy to solve. "They are both mountains we have to climb," he admitted.

Asked if he feared that doctors may object or feel threatened by the presence of a Minister in the management of hospital, Dr Balzan said simply that the minister's decision to open an office at casualty should not have any impact of how doctors conduct their profession.

"We are still going to insist on dealing with patients according to a strict medical priority system," he said.