UPDATED/More deliberate misleading of the public – this time, Chris Fearne

Chris Fearne: trying to mislead the public into thinking that the ‘Barts Gozo’ student population will be 300, when it will be just 60.

The way the government is plugging deliberately misleading factoids and messages into the public address system that is the media, on the matter of its ‘health agreement’, tells me that this was a specially-planned exercise to distract attention from all the bad press it’s been getting lately.

The bits of information they are chucking out to the people are, in many cases, confused and conflicting.

This is from a report in The Malta Independent:

Parliamentary Secretary for Healthcare Chris Fearne referred to the proposed medical school, adding that “300 foreign students will study in Gozo, with their families, the professors… imagine the economic result of this”.

He gives the impression that the 300 students will all be in Gozo at once from the first year, and that there will be 300 students entering the course every year. In other words, that what is known as the ‘student population’ – which is constant and unchanging year on year, even though the students themselves change – will be 300 from day one.

But the previous evening, one of them let slip while boasting in a speech – it could well have been Fearne himself – that “the campus will take 60 students a year and 300 over five years”.

So there will be 60 students in the first year of operation, 120 in the second year of operation (first-year students and second-year students), 180 students when they have reached third-year, and so on until they’re teaching all five years of students.

But now we discover that even the government’s figure of 60 is misleading – Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry has the information up on its website (link below). The projected intake for the first year is 30 students.

But there is a more pressing point which I can’t quite get clear in my mind, and which somebody better informed in this field might wish to clear up. To the best of my knowledge, teaching hospitals (Mater Dei Hospital and Gozo General Hospital are both teaching hospitals) are linked to one medical school only.

With the introduction of this new overseas course for Barts and The London, they are going to be used by two medical schools. How are things going to be dovetailed, and is there not a problem with that?

What is the view of the University of Malta’s Medical School? Has it been involved in the negotiations?