First patient services at Mater Dei this week

Two outpatient services will start being offered from Mater Dei Hospital this week.

The hospital, which was officially inaugurated at the end of June, will welcome expectant mothers on Tuesday for the first parentcraft sessions.

A few days later, clinical psychologists will start seeing patients. Another four outpatient areas are expected to migrate from St Luke's Hospital this month to start offering services from Mater Dei, a spokesman for the new hospital told The Sunday Times.

He explained that each part of the hospital was being thoroughly analysed by the Foundation for Medical Services before being handed over to the hospital management.

Any "snags" identified by the end-users during these in-depth checks are listed and referred to a specific team from the foundation, which fixes the teething problems before the hospital management takes over.

This is the third check to ensure patient safety. The first was carried out when the hospital was handed over by the contractor to the foundation and another was conducted by a team of engineers.

The first phase of migration kicked off two weeks ago when some 100 administrative and managerial employees started reporting for work at Mater Dei instead of St Luke's.

"The administration block is now populated and fully operational. After receiving the first group of workers around a fortnight ago, we are now looking forward to receiving the first patients," the spokesman said.

So far, the migration progress has been very smooth and according to schedule. In some cases, it is even slightly ahead of schedule.

Over the last few weeks, a number of clinical tests were carried out at Mater Dei's Medical Imaging Department, with patients needing X-rays asked to go to the new hospital so that the new digital scanning equipment could be used as part of the staff training programme which has now moved from theory to practice.