Updated | MP claims hospital investors ‘still searching for funding’ for €200 million project

Vitalis Global Healthcare, the winning bidder for a massive investment project into St. Luke’s Hospital, Karin Grech Hospital and the Gozo General Hospital, are still searching for funding for the €200 million project, shadow health minister Claudette Buttigieg claimed.

“A London-based company is conducting a due diligence test on Vitalis, because they haven’t yet found the necessary funding for the project,” Buttigieg said during a debate in Parliament on next year’s Budget. “I hope that the government doesn’t intend to give them a state guarantee as it had done for the power station investors.”

The government is expecting to sign a deal with the Singapore based company by the end of the year and the works on the three hospitals are expected to start in 2016.

She hit out at health minister Konrad Mizzi for only holding a meeting with the General Workers’ Union concerning the “secure” future of jobs for workers at the Gozo hospital, while not inviting representatives of other unions to the meeting.

“The government has deceived the Gozitans by telling them the Nationalist Party is trying to scare them by speaking about their job security,” she said. “However, the Union Haddiema Maghqudin and the Malta Medical Association have also sounded warnings about this potential privitisation.”

In his speech, health minister Konrad Mizzi didn’t deny Buttigieg’s claims about Vitalis, but hailed the investment project as public-private partnership as the next step in Malta’s healthcare and one that the government is “100% committed to see through”.

He pledged that all employees at the Gozo Hospital will retain their jobs, as well as their employment on the government books with the exact same wages and conditions, and the private company will reimburse the government for the costs. He also insisted that staff will get to keep their same collective agreements, and that future collective agreements will still be negotiated between government and the respective unions.

Displaying photos of the Gozo General Hospital taken at the start of 2013, Mizzi hit out at the previous administration for leaving it as a “third world hospital, with water falling through the cracks and inedible food”.

“We want to give the Gozitans a proper modern hospital worthy of the 21st century, and not third-world infrastructure,” he said. “However, there was a problem of funding, and we believe that the route we have decided to go down is the best possible one,” he said.

In her speech, Buttigieg also criticised the government for its “incompetence” in the funding behind the construction of two new wards at Mater Dei Hospital.

“The final project will cost €3 million more than the original plans, because its application for EU funding was considered as an entirely new project, rather than an extension of the original plan to build wards above the Accident and Emergency Department,” she said. “The hospital will house 68 new beds, none of which will be specialized, and each will now cost €169,117.”

While the original plans were to build new wards above the A&E Department, stress tests revealed that this was not viable due to concrete of inferior quality used to construct the columns.

“What is the current situation?” she asked of the government. “The government had pointed fingers at everybody when the concrete results emerged, but it has now gone completely silent. The silence is deafening.” 

‘People have lost heart in Mater Dei services’

Citing Mater Dei’s hospital activity report for the first half of 2015, Buttigieg said that 53% of outpatients are not turning up for their appointments as they “have lost heart in the hospital’s services”.

She said that the hospital has sent several faulty hospital appointment letters, with some people turning up to Mater Dei only to find that the letter was sent by mistake.

Other outpatients have received hospital appointment letters for appointments they had already gone to years ago, and one woman had received an appointment letter for her long-dead husband.

She accused the government for creating an “unequal society with no sense of social justice”.

“The Malta Community Chest Fund forks out €250,000 a month on chemotherapy and specialized care, whereas the government spent €4.2 million to bail out the owners of Café Premier, money that the MCCF could have used for a year and a half’s worth of cancer treatment,” she said.