What is your name and what is your official designation within the Ministry for Health?
Dr. Marius Caruana and I am a Senior General Practitioner within Primary Health Care.
Where do you work and what
do your duties entail?
I work at the Paola Health Centre and my duties include general practice of walk-in patients including routine and immediate care as
well as running of specialized clinics, for example Diabetes Clinic.
How long have you been
working with the Public Service?
16 years
Are there any specific
qualifications required for your post?
Successful completion of
Doctorate in Medicine and Surgery.
This is followed by two years of Foundation Training
and three years of Specialization in Family Medicine.
What attracted you to take
up your profession and to the health service?
It was always a dream to
be a medical professional. It is a thought which you keep on nurturing and
developing. The drive needs to be that whatever path you take, it keeps giving
you a rewarding feeling of fulfillment.
What motivates you most?
You are there to give aid
through your knowledge, your skills and more importantly through who you are.
If you are all present in the service you are giving, the outcomes will be a
unique driving force for you to keep going. It does not have to be all success.
You keep developing, learning and become better even from things which could
have been done better. The genuine appreciation given by patients who feel
helped is irreplaceable.
What about the teamwork
between different professions/roles involved in relation to patient care?
Working in the health
service gives you the opportunity of both intra and inter-professional
co-operation which can be maximized to give best service to the patients. As of
late, the trend was towards highly specialized service, requiring the input of
multiple allied health care professionals. Family Medicine is a field which is
inherently general in its approach and thus the GP’s ability to co-ordinate a
multidisciplinary team round the patient’s needs has become an elementary
skill.
Can you give us one
challenge and one success story?
A challenge for Primary
Health Care is to re-establish the focal point of Maltese health care provision
to the community. The building of a modern and highly functional hospital like
Mater Dei had shifted this focus into secondary care. With an increasingly
growing population, there needs to be a reverse back to the community, a
process which has already started and needs to keep on being refined.
General practice in Malta
has gone through multiple successes during the past years. The establishment of
a local specialization in Family Medicine, under the auspices of the Malta
College of Family Medicine and supported by the Ministry of Health, has created
the opportunity for more doctors to take up this career, enriching the service
through the diversity of its members.
The introduction of the
Electronic Patients’ Records (EPR) by Primary Health Care is another milestone
worth mentioning. It has propelled the service into the digital age, enhancing
both the patient’s experience and opening wide the doors for research into the
work we do.
What advice would you give
to young students considering taking up this profession?
If you care about the
well-being of others then it is the right path for you. Yes it needs long-hours
of studying, yes it needs working grueling nights but the satisfaction given by
a job done well will help you find your path through the meshwork.
What are the benefits of
working with the public service?
The public service is
increasingly becoming like a large community of its own. Via the digitalization
of the public services and higher inter departmental co-operation, the service
is able to provide a structure which will help you nurture your career while
providing you the opportunity to balance work performance and quality of life
via both an Employee Support Program and Family friendly measures.