Badly done indeed

 

Shocking that it took the management of a home for orphaned and destitute young women more than 12 months to establish that (alleged) inappropriate disciplinary measures were being administered to the children in their care. And that it took a Cabinet Minister who just got that portfolio back to take the bull by the horns.

That is, of course, if it was proven that the girls were being handcuffed, which is what, I presume, Minister Cristina will be presenting in her appeal to the judgement. But why did this allegation not surface before? Or did it? Was the full report kept under wraps?

It was interesting that she did not mention handcuffs on the Times video interview. But she did in the accompanying report. It seems that this case was badly mismanaged from day one. Sadly ‘déjà vu’ springs to mind. It was reported that the woman in question was engaged in 2009 and asked to leave two years later on direct orders from Dolores Cristina, who had just retaken the Social Policy Ministry.

However, the woman was suspended on full pay for nearly two years, pending the outcome of an inquiry, not sacked outright, according to the Home’s new chairman’s testimony.

According to press reports on Wednesday and Thursday, no details were given at the tribunal by the ministry as to why the experts (who are they) had recommended the post of coordinator be declared redundant. Why redundant?

Badly done indeed. The inquiry was not about the post no longer being necessary, but about the allegation that it was being inappropriately managed.

And was she a coordinator, or did she “Head the residential home” as reported by The Times’Kurt Sansone in his interview with Minister Cristina on Friday. If she did indeed head the home and that post was made redundant, does that mean the home is headless?

Minister Cristina only referred to the woman by name and did not mention the post on camera. It is a rarity for a Minister to be found guilty of unfairly dismissing an employee. The Industrial Tribunal awarded the former policewoman €3,900 compensation and ruled that reinstatement would not be practical. Well, if the post was declared redundant, it means it no longer exists.

According to the minister, following serious allegations by the residents and staff against Mrs Bartolo (described as the home programme co-ordinator at the home in previous reports) she had advised the then chairman Richard Manchè (now deceased) that a board of inquiry was to be set-up to establish whether the allegations were substantiated.

"Mrs Marisa Bartolo's training and extensive experience in the police force have formed her and conditioned her behaviour to date. More than 12 months of direction from the home’s director, role modelling and feedback from the other members of staff have not yielded the desired changes. Her position with the Conservatorio (home) set-up is, therefore, considered untenable", was the excerpt of the boards’ inquiry presented to the tribunal and no details were cited, according to the reports.

No mention of redundancy here, or handcuffs. And, again according to press reports, that was the content of the letter sent to Mrs Bartolo telling her she lost her job.

So who were the experts citing redundancy mentioned at the tribunal? And why did the question of handcuffs not surface at the tribunal? Now if the home director (who I assume is the home head) had given direction and other staff feed back to Mrs Bartolo for more than 12 months and it had not yielded results, why did it have to be the minister to take action? Surely it was up to the management to deal with the problem.

And are the same people who did not deal with the problem until the minister’s intervention still managing the home? I know the Board has a new chairman, but what about the other members? Were they around in the 12 months when Mrs Barolo behaviour was being questioned and no action was taken? Were they appointed for their relevant expertise or Party connections?

If the allegations were substantiated in the inquiry’s report, which is what Minister Cristina said in the interview, why was the report not fully divulged at the Tribunal? The case was instituted against her because she personally got involved in the case soon after her re-appointment as Social Policy Minister.

The published excerpts of the report in the press on Wednesday and Thursday, made no mention of handcuffs and there was no mention of details on what behaviour (implicitly negative) formed and conditioned by her police training and experience affected her post. Nor did it specify what changes were required after direction and feedback given by the home’s director and other members of staff.

Yet, in her Times interview on Friday, the minister said that serious inappropriate behaviour was substantiated in the Board report. “She was violating their (the adolescents in her care) privacy and resorting to restraining measures, including the use of handcuffs, against all the philosophy of the programmes the young women were following,” she said.

The board wrote in its report that the use of handcuffs was “completely inappropriate”, she added. Does it need a board of inquiry to establish that using handcuffs on children is inappropriate? But it looks like those vital details were not presented to the Tribunal, or were they?

In the light of the report and its recommendations, Mrs Cristina said she wrote to the chairman of the Conservatorio Bugeja Home, the late Richard Manché, Ms Bartolo’s direct employer, to terminate her employment.

Now seriously, should not the negative implications of dealing with discipline been noted at the interview stage. I would have thought that that would have been an important question for a former police officer applying for a job dealing with vulnerable young women.

Mrs Bartolo told the tribunal that she had overreached the one-year probation period and was even told by the late Richard Manchè, that she was doing well. The latter of course cannot now be substantiated, unless he did so in writing.

However, her claim that she had been suspended and then dismissed without being given the chance to defend herself over the allegations and that there had been no disciplinary hearing has merit. And was she really not told the specifics on why she had lost her job?

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Local leaders should get used to being lampooned

Oh please, how I wish many of my country folk would grow up and muster a degree of sophistication. I cannot believe the palaver, fuss and non-sequitur comments online following a photomontage of Prime Minister Laurence Gonzi in Gaddafi’s uniform on a Facebook page.

Mind you, it also got wide coverage in The Times online, topping “In Discussion”. Someone recognised what the people want, what they really, really want. I am not repeating myself; I have just lifted the lines from (if I remember correctly) a Spice Girls record.

The much more serious articles about the resignation of Professor Stephen Brincat, the head of Mater Dei Hospital’s oncology department and its aftermath got less than half the number of comments overall. But more on that later; back to satire.

The Nationalist Party used to have the edge on sophistication. I am afraid they have been regressing and have lost it completely with their statement claiming the photomontage was “shameful, personal, rude and vulgar”.

Now, of course it was personal. It was meant to lampoon the Prime Minister. How can you send up the Prime Minister if not personally? It was silly of Rachel Tua, the woman whose page it appeared on, to say, “I don’t see why they should take it so personally.”
Really? Does she believe that depicting someone in a way that derides him is not personal? It was political satire and was not shameful, rude or vulgar is what Ms Tua should have told reporters and she would have been right.

How can a poster of the Prime Minister in a uniform (albeit Gaddafi’s) be shameful, rude or vulgar? Do many of the 322 Times online commentators really believe that Gonzi in a Gaddafi uniform meant he was as awful as Muammar? Are they really so simple minded? It was a send-up, a parody, not to be taken literally.

Politicians and other leaders all over the globe are wide open to that kind of gibe and they accept and ignore it, except in countries run by tyrants. Why the PN thinks its leader should be any different to the rest of the democratic world leaders says a lot about how unworldly it is.

Most of the online comments were by partisans, which is the norm here. They either expressed shock that the Prime Minister could be lampooned (PN), or responded with “What is good for the goose...”(PL). Others claimed that really rude, shameful and vulgar blogs had not been commented on by the PN, getting the response from other commentators that Ms Tua was part of the PL, therefore she should desist from such activity.

Yes, the woman whose Facebook page it appeared on is a Labour councillor who switched political allegiances even though former PN leader Eddie Fenech Adami was her great uncle. She obviously has a political agenda. So what?

The PN is not exactly coy when it comes to ridiculing members of the Opposition. It is all part of the political, puerile fun and games. So what is all this about the PL showing its “true face”? Which is what the PN statement said. Of course this is mud-slinging time as both parties are gearing themselves up for a general election. But as mud-slinging goes, let’s face it; the photomontage in question is hardly heavy handed.

And another thing, besides the politicians and their hangers-on who obviously have a partisan agenda, this national, blinkered view that anyone who dares criticise or disagree must have a political (in the partisan sense) agenda is truly pathetic. Talk about thinking outside the box. We need to take a step back as a nation and start to engage our brains, at least those of us who have one.

Take Stephen Brincat’s resignation, since his sister is married to the Speaker of the House, he would hardly have been keen on upsetting the apple cart. He must have been really pushed to the limit to spill the beans. He said that the government repeatedly ignored his advice on various important issues, making his position untenable.

 “The duties of a clinical chairman of a hospital department are not just to lead the service provision of that department but also to advise the government on matters pertaining to that speciality, cancer in this case... decisions were taken that wasted hundreds of thousands or euro”, he told The Times.

He gave a long detailed list of how the money was wasted. On the move of the oncology department, “Without the slightest bit of planning we were ordered to go to Zammit Clapp. After three years of useless planning we were then told we’d be going to Mater Dei.” Which is where Professor Brincat had agreed they should have gone in the first place. When he was asked whether he thought it was best to move oncology from Boffa to Mater Dei seven years ago, his answer was “a clear, though reluctant one, in favour of Mater Dei to join the other specialities,” he said.

“Apart from the hundreds of thousands of euro wasted, we wasted three precious years during which the life span of our single old linear accelerator (a machine) for treating cancer patients was fast running out.” Eventually, after the machine broke down several times, a new wing was built at Boffa to house a machine that had to eventually be moved to Mater Dei at great expense. “As always, no one is accountable,” he said.

Yet, how many people are worried about this lack of accountability? With all his faults, such a shame about his egocentricity and political naivety, Franco Debono was making waves on the answerability and responsibility of government.

Professor Brincat had warned the Health Department about the danger to the service, “but I was told that the political decision had been taken and that I should therefore shut up”.
Now, that latter statement does reek of a dictatorial style of governance.

Although Prof. Brincat made these sentiments public, many medical professionals are still not prepared to publicly back him on similar allegations despite “the policy to deliberately keep the National Cancer Plan a secret from the professionals that were meant to execute it until the day it was published”, which Professor Brincat disagreed with.

In an interview I had with another medical professional some years ago, this ‘secrecy’ factor, i.e. keeping the professionals in the dark right up to publication date of new plans, did come up. So it is nothing new. That begs the question, what are the professionals scared of? Why are they all keeping mum?


Article published in the Malta Independent on Sunday on 09 September 2012 

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