Opposition MP decries ‘disastrous’ mental health system

The situation at Mount Carmel has reached a disastrous state, shadow health minister Claudette Buttigieg said, pointing at industrial action that is occurring at the mental health hospital.

“While we must protect nurses, midwives, doctors, consultants and social workers, we must never forget that patients have a right,” Buttigieg said in her parliamentary adjournment. “More and more worried people are calling me up to complain about the treatment that their relatives are receiving, and it is a problem that we must take very, very seriously.”

She hit out at the Crisis Intervention Unit, operating at Mater Dei, for only working between 7am and 7pm rather than around the clock, and for not visiting the houses of every person who called them up.

She also said that the ratio of qualified mental health nurses to mental health patients is too small and that foreign nurses employed at Mount Carmel are creating further problems for some patients.

“I know cases of patients who believe that their family has sent them abroad for treatment, worsening their psychological problems,” Buttigieg said.

She also accused the government of solving the out-of-stock waiting list problem by awarding direct orders for frequently-changing, and warned that people with serious psychological problems find it difficult to adjust from one pill to another.

She recommended that midwives and nurses be given  more chances to specialize and called for more training for nurses and midwives to recognize psychological symptoms in their patients.

“Pregnant women who have been sexually abused as children are more likely to experience psychological problems both before and after giving birth,” she said.

She repeated her long-standing criticism of Mater Dei’s corridor situation.

“Recently, a family told me that their mother died in Mater Dei’s corridors without any dignity,” she said. “It is unacceptable that health services in corridors have become the norm. The Opposition considers the dignity of patients to be a priority, and the corridor on minus one floor of Mater Dei to be no replacement for a proper ward.”