MMSA and MHSA call upon the Government to secure funding for the promised medical school.
MMSA and MHSA call upon the Government to secure funding for the promised medical school.
Why this petition matters
By this coming January, Faculty of Medicine and Surgery students and Faculty of Health Science students will have their promised new medical school taken away from them. We will have no new lecture rooms, we will have no labs, we will have no proper faculty on campus to call our own. This is the current situation, and we need your help.
Following the multi-student organisation protest regarding the privatisation of university land, MMSA and MHSA feel the need to highlight the situation regarding the construction of the new medical school at the university campus, which is to be used by students from the faculty of medicine and surgery and the faculty of health sciences.
In 2019, Deputy Prime Minister and Health Minister Chris Fearne made a statement regarding the development of a new 8,000 square metre medical school at the University of Malta were made: “Once this new medical school is up and running, the Maltese Islands will have two of the best facilities in Europe,” he said, referring to the Barts Medical School in Gozo and the new medical school to be built on Campus Hub grounds.
This new building was meant to be fully developed, furnished, and in use by the end of the year. However, as the end of 2022 approaches, this facility is nowhere near done, with construction halted at around five storeys built, which is how it has remained for several months now. This is because the source of funding for the building/renting of the space by the University of Malta remains unclear, with no government entity willing to commit the required financial resources.
As it stands, if the funding for this project is not secured, Campus Hub Ltd will be allowed to develop the space as they wish, as long as it is education related, and this essential new medical school that will relieve much needed space in Mater Dei (due to the current medical school eventually being converted into wards), will remain a figment of our collective imagination.
Following the COVID-19 outbreak in Malta, many student spaces in the current medical school (located within Mater Dei Hospital), including the students’ library and staff cafeteria were converted into makeshift wards to accommodate the influx of patients during the pandemic. Two years on, hospital admissions are ever-rising and these makeshift wards appear to have become a permanent solution to the patient overload our national hospital is experiencing.
Whilst we acknowledge and appreciate that these measures were taken for the benefit of public health, there are no signs of these wards ever converting back into the student spaces that are desperately needed. Naturally, the argument against the conversion of these wards back into student spaces rests on the new medical school being built and providing these spaces for us; however, this is unfortunately no longer the case if the situation remains as it is. Should the new medical school be built, the current school would also be replaced by well-equipped wards and clinical areas which will allow even more services to be provided to our patients.
Where does this leave medical and healthcare students and the state of our national medical education? The infrastructure of the new medical building was meant to include multiple lecture rooms, study spaces, and simulation rooms for its students. Medical simulation rooms contain patient mannequins which are used to emulate a clinical scenario which would allow for an innovative and interactive learning space where healthcare students are allowed to maximise their clinical skills and become fully competent healthcare workers and practice certain clinical skills well before attempting to perform these procedures on patients.
Furthermore, the only student spaces at Mater Dei hospital include the communal cafeteria, any vacant lecture rooms (until asked to leave due to a lecture), and the outdoor spaces at medical school. Naturally, the moment it starts to rain, students have no shelter in these areas and their only potential study/relaxation area is taken away.
Political promises should be ironclad, not swept under the rug to be forgotten about. We are not going to forget this, and neither should you. To make one thing clear: it is an absolute shame that the future of adequate public medical education is being left entirely in the hands of student organisations to fight for, however this is what happens when political promises are broken, and we are more than willing to carry on this fight until what was promised back in 2019 is delivered.
MMSA and MHSA call upon the Minister for Health, the Minister for Education, the University of Malta, and Campus Hub Ltd. to come to an agreement and secure the appropriate funding for the new medical school building to be completed, and to allow over one thousand students, administrators, and lecturers to have the space they so desperately require, whilst simultaneously freeing up space for even more hospital beds to be placed in the current medical school’s place.
We also urge medical students, health science students, and members of the public to sign the following petition, which calls for these entities to enact the required actions.
Sources:
https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/new-medical-school-planned-next-to-mater-dei-hospital.745671