Barts and The London: it’s medical tourism

You know how the devil is in the detail – or, in the case of Maltese news reports, the real story is embedded somewhere deep in the main body of the text?

I read through the reports about the parliamentary debate on the government’s ‘health agreement’.

Buried in one online news report was the fascinating factoid that 125 beds at the Gozo General Hospital will be allocated to Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry while the remaining beds will be used for state hospital purposes.

Buried in another online news report I found health secretary Chris Fearne quoted as saying that “the name Barts will put us on the medical tourism map where services will be offered to tourists against payment”.

So the government is deliberately giving the impression that Barts and The London will be building and managing a state hospital for Maltese patients when what we have here – squirreling out the information buried in news reports and putting it together – is a straightforward business deal under which Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry (which, as the name implies, is not a hospital management company) get 125 beds on a Mediterranean island which will be booked by paying patients from overseas who want a spot of elective surgery in a pleasant climate without having to go on a UK waiting list. How this fits in with the 60-student campus is best left to the imagination for now.