EXCLUSIVE/Government to discontinue community midwife service; company tries to force community midwives to send in resignation letter

HealthMark, the agency which has taken over the national health service operations of the Malta Memorial District Nursing Association, better known as the MMDNA, has rung up the community midwives on the MMDNA payroll and demanded that they send in a letter of resignation.

HealthMark has no grounds to dismiss them, and so is trying to bully them into ‘resignation’. Employees who resign, rather than being made redundant, are not eligible for unemployment benefits. But that is almost a minor point here.

The midwives, along with other MMDNA employees, had been promised that there would be no change in their terms and conditions of work.

Healthmark cannot dismiss them because it is against the law to do so. I spoke to a specialist in employment law, who said: “This flies in the face of ‘transfer of business’ regulations, which were devised precisely to protect employees in just this sort of situation.”

MMDNA midwives who contacted me earlier this evening said: “We were assured that our terms and conditions of employment would remain the same, and that the only difference would be a new logo on our uniform. Then the next thing we know, they were ringing us on our mobile phones and demanding that we send in a letter of resignation. They did not even email us or write. They phoned.”

That is so as not to leave any written record of their illegal and abusive demand for your resignation, I explained. They want to make it seem that it was all voluntary.

This tactic is not being used on the community nurses, but only on the community midwives.

At least one midwife responded to the telephone demand by emailing back not with her resignation but with her refusal to resign. HealthMark rang her back – instead of responding by email – and said that it is going to stop the community midwifery service and that she would have to resign.

And that is a separate but equally important issue: why is the national health’s community midwife service to be stopped?

The Malta Memorial District Nursing Association was set up in 1945 as World War II ended, by Captain Robert Ingham MBE. Since then it has operated as a not-for-profit organisation, providing home health care through nurses and midwives to tens of thousands of people, working in cooperation with the national health service.

Community midwives visit women who have just given birth, once they have returned home, to check up on their health and the health of their baby. They carry out a full maternal check-up – breasts, uterus, sutures, bleeding, signs of post-natal depression, and also check the baby for jaundice, problems with mouth and eyes, nappy rash, feeding difficulties, and the umbilical cord.

They also answer any questions the new mother might have, visiting her once a week for three weeks, and referring her for further treatment where necessary.

One community midwife told me this evening: “A lot of our work is in advice and the prevention of more serious problems, and I really do worry that discontinuing this service is a serious step in the wrong direction.”