Every week Mater Dei Hospital is discharging 50 patients fewer than it admits, according to the Hospital Activity Report for the first six months of this year.
It also indicates a seven per cent increase in patients at the emergency department during the first semester.
The report, which the Nationalist Party said the government had failed to release, indicates unprecedented crowding at Malta’s only general hospital, health shadow minister Claudette Buttigieg said.
“These figures show management at Mater Dei is nonexistent and that the government has managed to increase the problems at the general hospital instead of solving them as it promised,” she said.
Accusing the government of giving wrong information and of hiding the truth, the PN shadow minister asked why the government has stopped publishing hospital statistics.
“The result of all the mismanagement is clear for all. Never in the history of Mater Dei were patients left in the corridors during the summer months,” she said. “This summer, this has become the order of the day.”
Acting CEO Joseph Zarb Adami had already expressed concern to the Times of Malta over the “unprecedented” overcrowding at Mater Dei, which he believed could be due to an unusually high number of people admitted for elective surgeries.
According to the report released yesterday, 45,145 admissions were registered between January and June, an increase of two per cent over last year. However, planned surgeries only increased by 91 during the first six months of the year, prompting Ms Buttigieg to accuse the government of “lying” when it attributed the crowding problem to more elective surgeries.
“The public is fast losing faith in the public health service,” Ms Buttigieg said, urging the government to get its act together.
In a reaction, the government said the report, which the PN claimed was kept under wraps, was nothing more than an internal document that had long been drawn up by successive administrations and used by management to evaluate hospital operations.
It blamed the problem of patients in corridors on the previous Nationalist government, which had not catered to the people’s needs. It was not true this was the first summer to see such a phenomenon, it added, giving figures for 2011 and 2012.
The government also listed the measures it was taking to solve the problems in the health sector, such as the building of a new medical admissions unit hosting 368 beds, turning Karin Grech into a geriatric hospital and St Luke’s into a rehabilitation hospital.
The number of operations being done had increased substantially and out-of-stock medicines were few, it said. Waiting lists were reduced and primary care bolstered.