A number of medical imaging appointments at Mater Dei Hospital set some time ago will go ahead as planned on election day on June 6 even if other outpatient visits have been postponed.

A spokesman for the Health Parliamentary Secretariat confirmed that outpatients' appointments have been cancelled in line with a request by the Electoral Commission.

"The rationale of cancelling appointments and curtailing hospital visiting hours is to stop people from coming to Mater Dei Hospital, to prevent access to ward areas and avoid confusion on polling day," he said.

The same procedure was followed during every general election in the past 20 years and in the first EP election in 2004.

The spokesman said no outpatient services, including physiotherapy sessions, would be held in hospitals and no specialist sessions would take place in health centres on polling day. Outpatient dispensary services in all hospitals will be closed and no non-urgent laboratory or radiological investigations will be carried out.

Moreover, only emergency operations will be carried out while the referral of patients from one hospital to another will be restricted.

However, a number of appointments set a while back within the Medical Imaging Department have been retained.

Visiting hours in hospitals will be cancelled and only a few people, including those collecting patients to take them to vote, relatives of patients in a critical condition, parents whose children are in hospital and the husbands of women who had just given birth or were in labour would be allowed inside the hospital.

The spokesman said doctors and nurses working in the outpatient department would be helping in taking patients recovered in hospital to vote in their hometown. This involved a considerable amount of additional work. Staff, he said, would be expected to vote before going in to work or afterwards.