As I was driving along the Birkirkara Bypass, to my surprise I noticed a change of billboards. A colourful and vivid billboard now promoted the Rise Up Party featuring Jaba, Ira Losco, Scream Daisy, Joseph Armani and The Characters, replacing for a brief spell the continuous and nauseating posters advertising Mater Dei, “Budget fis-Sod” (“A Sound Budget”) and the ever-present Euro campaign.
I am not averse to information campaigns but if they linger on ad infinitum then they will become boring and counter-productive. The main traffic arteries are inundated with pro-Government billboards, paid for out of our taxes to further the Government’s chances of winning another five years to add to the past 20.
The plethora of billboards, posters, newspapers ads, radio and TV spots all point in one direction: how productive is the reigning government and how fortunate we are to benefit from our benevolent masters?
But it seems that the lavish propaganda campaign about Mater Dei is having undesired effects. Mater Dei was advertised by government as a five-star hotel rather than a general hospital. This led thousands of people to flock to Tal-Qroqq to satisfy their curiosity on what the ‘state-of-the-art’ wonder had to offer. Some Nationalist candidates also organised coffee mornings on this prestigious site. Having established Mater Dei as a hotel rather than as a hospital, when it started to function for the purpose it was built, the hospital staff realised that they had visits by persons not really in need of any medical service.
I have been informed that especially on the weekends, people are inventing excuses to be admitted to the Casualty Department simply because they wanted to use Mater Dei. A person who pretended to be suffering from a haemorrhage later told hospital staff that his wife had told him to invent the story. Another person told me that he had to wait for about seven hours to receive treatment at Casualty. There were many visitors who should not have been there. It was very much in place that the hospital authorities appealed to the general public to go to Mater Dei only if they needed a medical service. Those who visit Mater Dei just for curiosity’s sake are hindering the work of the hospital staff, creating a nuisance to patients who need serenity and focussed attention.
The propaganda campaign led by government should stop immediately and allow the Mater Dei staff to concentrate on bona fide patients.
It was with real sadness that I read Godfrey Grima’s contribution in the press narrating with some detail the ordeal suffered by his mother at the hands of certain unprofessional employees at Mater Dei.
A 93-year-old lady ought to have been treated with real kindness and care but instead she was scolded and refused the basic services required by bed ridden patients. Excellent treatment was then offered at Karen Grech which is not a state-of –the-art five star hotel.
The hospital’s backbone is the quality of service it offers and not the polished floors and the spotlights we were entertained with in certain programmes on PBS. The embellishments only add quality to the service and can in no way substitute it.
People are waking up to the reality of the situation. As soon as the opening date started approaching the government realised that it had not planned for enough nurses and considered the possibility of bringing nurses from abroad. It was only now that it was realised that the hospital was not big enough and I a, informed that patients in medicine wards had to be transferred to surgery wards. If St Luke’s lacked the capacity to avoid having patients in corridors, how can Mater Dei cope if it is smaller than its predecessor?
The brainwashing campaign will soon take its toll on its inventor and perpetrator.
The general public also has a role to play. No one should seek the hospital’s services if not in real need. When St Luke’s was still in operation as the principal general hospital, medical and health authorities often reminded us that if we can be satisfied with a service offered at one of the district health clinics we should not burden the workload of St Luke’s. The same should apply to Mater Dei. It is our duty to make a success of the new hospital and to achieve that, we have to forget the billboards hanging along our roads and the sickening brainwashing we were made to suffer for so many months as part of government electioneering.
Government has also been feeding us its brainwashing charm on the budget. Radio spots urge us to log onto the budget website; TV programmes at prime time instigating us to submit to subliminal messages hitting our intellectual capabilities, and making us succumb to a veritable praise for our caring administrators.
The government’s propaganda machine is roaring louder than many would think or believe. Government advisors are encouraging the brainwashing campaign with the strong belief that a brainwashed electorate would be an easy kill at the ballots.
I beg to differ. Excessive propaganda raises the expectations of the electorate, and when you fail to deliver the promised product, you fall victim to your own ploys. Government may live to rue the day when it assumed that the packaging was more important than the real stuff.