Paul Pace, President of The Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses has said in a statement today that “while the Health Division is planning to open an orthopaedic ward in Gozo General Hospital, “the main chronic problems afflicting the patients in Gozo General Hospital are being totally ignored with no sign of being addressed.”
Due to such high social cases in Female General Ward, MUMN said that it has “been constrained to order all its members not to admit patients for any elective surgery in Female General Ward since such patients after surgery would end up in corridors where definitely the standards of care and the health and safety of the patients after surgery would not be to any acceptable standard.”
“While all the media attributes bed blockers, social cases and patients in corridors as chronic problems usually attributed to Mater Dei Hospital, Gozo General Hospital managed to escape the attention of all media even though there were numerous occasions where social cases was constantly on the increase and placed in corridors within Female General ward,” the statement said.
According to the Union, currently in the Female General Ward, the only ward for female patients, which takes in medical, orthopaedic and surgical female patients half of its occupants are classified as social cases or elderly patients waiting to be placed in elderly residential homes.
Such a ward which is supposed to have 33 beds, has currently 43 beds, with beds in corridors extending up to the main door of the ward. Female patients had also to be placed in the Male General Ward, the Union said.
It added that “while it is nice to have an orthopaedic ward in the future in Gozo General Hospital such an orthopaedic ward cannot be at the expense of not addressing the main issue of beds for the elderly patients in Gozo. This is evident with the continuous raise of social cases in Gozo General Hospital.”
“Nurses in the Female General Ward are working back to the standards of Florence Nightingale since the small number of nurses are nursing a huge number of patients,” the Union said. “The only difference from the days of Florence Nightingale is that the situation is now even worst from those days since nursing has become much more intensive and “sophisticated” than in the days of Florence Nightingale.”
MUMN has appealed to the Health Division “to start addressing the social cases in Gozo General Hospital by refurbishing the empty wards in GGH and the situation does not need to deteriorate even further at the detriment of the patients and the nurses working in Gozo General Hospital.”