Wednesday, May 26, 2010

This morning I went to see a presentation given by JRS staff at Mater Dei, the main hospital in Malta. It was for health professionals, aimed at improving cultural awareness when treating migrants, as Malta is still dealing with a lot of xenophobia. There is a new Migrant Health Unit which just recently began training “cultural mediators,” who are more than just translators, but try to bridge the gap in the differences between Western and non-Western approaches to medicine. Most of the migrants are treated in Floriana, where there's a smaller health center, but for emergencies and other occasions they do come to the hospital, and there are no interpreters or cultural mediators employed at this time who can translate for migrants who do not speak English. JRS and other NGOs are pushing to get some on staff at the hospital. MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres) employs some mediators, and they are sometimes called to come to the hospital, but they are stretched pretty thin as they have many other responsibilities throughout the country: outreach, other clinics, etc.

JRS had a social worker, a lawyer, a cultural mediator, and our director Fr Joe speak about their experiences—they stressed that they were not there to teach or push their views on the health workers, but simply share what they knew and try to give a more complete picture of what migrants have been through (crossing the Sudanese desert, abominal conditions and persecution in Libya, treacherous sea passage). JRS mentioned that a frequent complaint by health professionals is that migrants are dirty or never shower, etc, but they had powerpoints which showed the horrible conditions of the detention, as well as the Open Centres, which is where people are placed if they are granted asylum or have reached the limit of time when they can lawfully be detained. The access to shower and bathroom facilities is awful and sometimes the detainees aren’t given clean clothes or even shoes. So, it's understandable if someone isn't able to come showered or is late to an appointment because of waiting in line for various things. Epecially for those in detention, they are at the mercy of the soliders who can decide if they do or do not have time to take someone to the hospital, or a van might not be available, or whatever.

The people who attended were very receptive, but of course the presentation was optional, so those with the most misconceptions didn’t hear any of the information. It was mostly nurses; all of the doctors were invited but there was only one in attendance.

The most exciting thing for me, of course, was to see government run health care in action ;)

btemplates

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