Health authorities utilised just 20 per cent of the €4 million budget allocated last year specifically to tackle the waiting list problem at Mater Dei Hospital, figures obtained by The Sunday Times show.
Around €600,000 of the €840,000 spent went towards salaries of clinical staff, while more than €178,500 was dedicated to surgery consumables. Another €61,000 was spent on salaries for clerical duties.
When contacted, a spokesman for the Health Ministry stopped short of explaining why only 20 per cent of the total budget was spent on tackling the problem, saying that various measures taken were proving successfu – so much so that “we are no longer talking about waiting lists but waiting time”.
The extra €4 million was allocated in the 2010 Budget speech. Finance Minister Tonio Fenech described the sum as special funding “to reduce hospital waiting lists”. He had added the government was committed to giving “absolute priority” to reducing waiting lists to acceptable levels within three years.
Despite this large budget, the government only utilised a fraction of it. However, the spokesman insisted the number of surgical interventions at Mater Dei Hospital throughout 2010 had increased to over 40,000.
Moreover, the number of operations at the hospital in the first three months this year increased by 2,202 over the same quarter in 2007, totalling 10,761.
The figures were compared with 2007 because that was the last year the health service operated from St Luke’s Hospital. Elective operations recorded an 84 per cent rise, of which 1,068 were ophthalmic and 1,033 were orthopaedic.
“These results confirm that the government’s thrusts aimed at making better use of facilities at Mater Dei Hospital, and consequently increasing the throughput of elective surgery, are being successful,” the spokesman said.
The health authorities are conducting an exercise to centralise the waiting list database, collating data from all the different waiting lists that existed and compiling them into one more manageable database.
This exercise revealed how some patients had died while waiting for treatment while others had resorted to surgery in a private hospital. These were removed from the list.
There were instances where patients’ names featured on multiple occasions on the database as they had been inserted there by different consultants. Part of the exercise involved sending out letters to each patient on the lists, which was sometimes followed up with a phonecall.
The painstaking exercise began on the list for the orthopaedic operations, which was one of the longest.
The people on that list were then prioritised according to the patients’ clinical needs, based on pre-defined clinical criteria.
Although scrutiny of the list was an “ongoing process”, the list for elective surgery related to certain specialities was reduced by around 40 per cent, the spokesman said.