How interesting that the general secretary of the Medical Association of Malta was the one to blame the number of no-shows at Mater Dei Hospital’s Outpatients Department on long waiting lists. He said “lengthy” hospital waiting lists led many patients to give up on more than 60,000 doctor’s appointments last year.

The MAM is, after all, the representative of the doctors who have most to gain if patients give up on getting a free health service and instead resort to private care. It is reassuring when public interest is given precedence.

Martin Balzan launched a broadside at the government, shooting down the claims made by the Health Department about improvements in the service. He went so far as to declare that the much-trumpeted shorter waiting lists was noi more than an “illusion”, pointing out that what had in fact happened was for the bottleneck to be shifted from surgery to the Outpatients Department.

The government rejected such claims, insisting they were “completely wrong” and not backed up by statistics.

The face-off started out on a positive note at a press conference when a hospital activity report showed that the number of admissions at Mater Dei had risen from 60,000 eight years ago to 90,000 last year, something that certainly cannot be due to a comparative increase in the population.

An additional 95 hospital beds were provided and the number of people visiting the Outpatients Department was up 10 per cent to 480,000. Twenty operating theatres were being used, a far cry from the handful in past years, with others being mothballed for a variety of totally unacceptable reasons.

There seems to be lack of information, or some confusion, about the number of consultants. The doctors’ union, which apparently was forced to scan The Malta Government Gazette to find out what the real situation is like, insists there were only five new consultants appointed in 2015, backing Dr Balzan’s earlier comment that the number had remained fairly static. The Health Ministry insists that “over the past two years in Mater Dei alone, there has been a net increase of 57 specialists over-and-above specialists brought in to replace retiring ones”. Information on the matter was subsequently also provided in Parliament. Pirty that a fundamental matter to public health policy should be reduced to a war of words.

Healthcare is a prime social issue and, therefore, the authorities must ensure the system delivers the best possible outcome for the revenue spent on it.

It should be subject to management information reports just as any other business should, with audits of clinical outcomes to challenge preconceptions about what is being delivered.

A sector of the economy that absorbs 13.9 per cent of government spending – €486 million in 2014, according the latest National Statistics Office release – deserves much better.

One can hardly not acknowledge the improvements made in the national healthcare system over the years. The state-of-the-art hospital is a case in point though the final product could have evidently been much better had the two parties put their heads together rather than try to score political points.

Sins of omission and commission by both Labour and Nationalist administrations as well as political expediency led to a situation where hundreds of millions of euros were spent on a hospital that only resulted in a fraction of the improvements that could have been achieved.

Political bickering and pique along the years often hurt the sector and done a disservice to the people, especially patients. More dangerously, fearing they would lose votes, both parties continue to make pledges knowing they are unsustainable.