Health services far from "free"

Beds in Mater Dei Hospital do not come cheap, with those in a surgery ward costing the State €180 a day, about €147 in orthopaedics and a whopping €1,038 in the intensive therapy unit.

Surgical operations are not cheap either: an operation to remove an appendix costs about €1,503, a cataract operation about €705 and a hip replacement could cost as much as €4,800, figures seen by The Times show.

Thousands of tests are carried out every day at hospital; nearly five million were carried out last year, a daily average of over 13,000. Tests for cholesterol or sugar levels in blood topped the list with almost 2.9 million ordered last year.

Tests also cost money: one histology test (analysis of tissues taken during surgical procedures) costs about €9.88. With 71,487 histology tests done in 2008, this added up to about €706,291 of taxpayers' money.

Similarly, about €818,130 was spent on the 67,951 virology tests (for viral infections) carried out last year. Each test costs €12.04.

People had to understand that the health services were not actually "free" because everything was paid for by the taxpayers, Health Parliamentary Secretary Joe Cassar said.

Everything in hospital cost money, including the ward beds, the medical tests and the operations, some of which ran into thousands of euros, Dr Cassar said.

Plans are underway to give patients discharged from Mater Dei a full breakdown of how much their stay cost the taxpayers.

The measure will only be launched once the results of the government-launched costing exercise of the whole system are studied.

Similarly, the hotly-discussed waiting lists are also being placed under scrutiny.

Dr Cassar explained that part of the exercise involved sending letters to each patient on the lists, which was sometimes followed up by a phone call.

The painstakingly long exercise has started on the list for the orthopaedic operations, which was one of the longest. Although the scrutinising of the list was not yet complete, it had already been cut by 30 per cent, Dr Cassar said.

He pointed out that this was not just a matter of numbers. Behind each number was a patient with his suffering and problems, he said.

Figures tabled in Parliament recently reveal that the number of ophthalmic patients waiting for surgery, including for cataracts, fell by just over 300 - from 6,157 to 5,847 - between January and June. The vast majority of them - 5,628 - were waiting for cataract surgery.

The waiting lists were evaluated between January and February and again between June and July.

Even though progress was registered in certain areas, the waiting list for orthopaedic operations rose by more than 460, with 10,660 waiting for different operations, including knee and hip replacements. These included 1,559 patients who were on the list of a retired orthopaedic consultant. In next year's Budget, the government has allocated €4 million to reduce waiting lists for operations within three years.