Free medicines system being reviewed
Private GPs to be included in the primary health care system
The government is reviewing the free medicines system, Health Parliamentary Secretary Joe Cassar said this morning.
Speaking during a news conference on the work done by his secretariat during the past year, Dr Cassar said that 41,000 yellow cards were processed including 18,000 new ones. The yellow card provides patients suffering from particular conditions with free medicines irrespective of financial position.
Dr Cassar said that in the past year there was a daily average of 1,000 outpatient appointments, 100 operations and 11,000 laboratory tests.
On waiting lists, he pointed out that people were not numbers and stressed that lists had to be reduced to acceptable levels.
However, they could only become more manageable and transparent through a centralised IT system which the department was working upon. A pilot study for waiting lists had been embarked upon in the orthopaedic department and this saw the list for hip replacements dropping by 25 per cent when duplicated names were removed.
He also spoke about staff shortages, saying that the lack of nurses and health care professionals was an international problem which Malta was working on.
The hospital last year employed 160 new nurses and a scheme had now been introduced so that nurses who wanted to continue working after reaching retirement age could do so.The four-year-university nursing course was also being reduced to three.
As regarded the doctors’ brain drain, Dr Cassar noted that in the past 10 years, around 80 percent of newly graduated doctors went to the UK and never returned. So an agreement was reached for post-graduate courses to start being held in Malta.
Dr Cassar said that the secretariat was also working on a study on how to include private GPs in the primary health care system, giving them access to tests and patients medical records. It was calculated that for each visit to a health centre, there were three visits to private GPs.
On breast screening, he said the national breast screening programme would hopefully be up and running by the end of next year.
As for the Oncology Centre at Mater Dei, Dr Cassar said that construction should start by the end of the yyear. The secretariat, he said, had completed an advanced draft of the National Cancer Strategy for prevention and cure.