Government strikes deal with MUMN amid hospitals’ management takeover

Government has this morning signed an agreement with the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses aimed at ensuring continuity of working conditions for its workers in the Gozo Hospital, Karen Grech Hospital and St. Luke’s Hospitals following management takeover by Vitals Global Healthcare.

The agreement ensures that healthcare workers remain government employees, with all the privileges and conditions that entails.

The agreement comes after government had announced a public private partnership with Vitals Global Healthcare for the management of the three facilities. The new operator aims to be funded by profits from medical tourism, Health Minister Chris Fearne said. The public-private partnership between the Government and Vitals Global Healthcare  will lead to a higher standard of healthcare in Malta with services remaining free of charge for Maltese citizens. It was estimated that each medical tourist will contribute some €10,000 to the economy, Mr Fearne said.

Under the agreement, nurses, midwives, social workers, ECG technicians and physiotherapists are to continue as government employees.“We have always said that we must take care of our staff,”  said Fearne, adding that “happy workers” are productive workers.

Negotiations with unions representing hospital staff started some months ago.

The agreement is also to consolidate and confirm the conditions they currently enjoy as agreed with the unions throughout the years. This spans issues such as leave, sick leave, transfer requests, to uniforms.

New collective and sectoral agreements are also to apply to all future workers in the public-private partnership agreement.

“It is an agreement that we have been discussing for months and the MUMN were not pushovers ... We need to ensure that the PPP agreement strengthens the rights of the workers and not weaken them.”

MUMN general secretary Colin Galea said: “MUMN has always insisted that employees need to be taken care of, not just patients. It is not enough for the hospitals to be state of the art. The MUMN needed to ensure that its achievements over the years remain and are strengthened in future.”

Non-Maltese workers engaged by the hospitals are to bind themselves to learn Maltese in one year, he added. This measure was intended to ensure accurate communication between Maltese workers and patients, Galea said.

To an extent, the management is going to change but the staff is to remain the same, Galea added. “There is going to be a leap forward in environment. St Luke’s Hospital, Karin Grech and Gozo hospital have served well but the workers deserve a state-of-the-art workplace.”


“Our members asked us to move from just talk to facts. We now have something black on white to reassure ourselves.”