Bedrock Malta

To find the real Malta, there is no better place than Mater Dei’s Emergency Department at night. There you find a Malta you probably never thought existed.

There you find that Malta is probably more multicultural than you ever thought. Indians, Italians, Chinese, boat people.

Collectively they do not amount to the number of Maltese in the waiting room, but there is such a crowd that the queue of people just to register their ID snakes to the door.

The Maltese come in all sizes and colours. Young men with tattoos covering their arms, worried mums with fractious children, women who in the Italian phrase “ci sanno fare” and who walk around as if they own the place, and timid people who let everyone jump the queue.

Then, inevitably, as it starts getting late, arguments begin. Now, the A&E rule is that no matter when you arrive, there may be people whose need for medical attention is greater than yours. But people are not stupid. How come that girl who sashayed in with her mother gets immediate attention and you have to wait.

Then, what we could call gross misunderstandings start to happen. At the door of the Minor Injuries Department, a doctor opens the door, takes the papers, sends the people back to the main reception area … and disappears. An hour or two later, people barge into the main operations area and are told the doctor has left for the day, because that is a GP section, and the people have been called three times on the tannoy and their paper has been shredded. This is definitely a lie for no such announcement was made.

That’s when people start complaining and their language would make Chris Fearne’s ears turn blue. A man, who had been operated in the stomach some days previously, had his stitches removed earlier in the day and his stomach burst open. Yet at 3am, some eight hours after he arrived, he was still waiting to be seen. When his wife went to complain, someone asked her if she had come from a ministry.

A foreigner who must have hit (or been hit) his head, had blood streaming down his face, mopped up by a towel, was only seen at around 2.30am. People were saying he would have probably been seen to quicker had he gone to a health clinic.

And then the accidents, even though this was not Saturday night. An MVA victim, throwing up on his stretcher. A woman who had a black and blue eye.

And a young woman who was screaming in pain for a long time without being seen to. A young man who was about to fall out of his bed and his distraught mother going around asking people to help him and nobody seemed to hear her.

The A&E Department during the dead hours of the night is a scene from Bedlam, with nurses, doctors, policemen, security guards and hospital personnel milling around. To an outsider who happens to be there, this is confusion writ large. Maybe there is method in this madness, one would not know.

Anyway, people somehow are seen to and the waiting queue of people lessens. The doctors and the nurses are also bedrock Malta: they work in those awful circumstances, they even joke, exchange gossip, some do see to people (and they are wonderfully good about it and thorough).

This does not seem to happen only in Malta. There are cases of worse things happening in other A&Es in other countries. But somehow, we are told ours is the best hospital around.

When a doctor sends a patient to A&E, it is because, in the