Malta is embarking on an extensive audit of the present healthcare system to determine the cost of every service and product in order to be able to plan better.
Social Policy Minister John Dalli said yesterday that an exercise of deploying administrators and accountants within the sector to conduct this audit was being worked on and should be finalised by the end of the year.
Speaking during the launch of a project through which European experts will help local health officials set up a better health accounting system, Mr Dalli stressed the importance of having all the information in a timely manner to be able to make health-related decisions.
The six-month EU project should enable the health sector to price procedures and be in a better position of knowing how much everything costs.
"At the moment there are global figures but we need micro figures for better planning," Neville Calleja, the director of the Department of Health Information and Research, said.
He pointed out that although authorities knew more or less how much a hospital bed cost, this was an average figure which did not take into consideration what procedures each patient needed or what part of the hospital s/he was staying in.
Figures released by the government last month show that a bed in a general ward costs more than €256 a day while a bed in a high dependency ward costs over €489 daily and a bed in the intensive care unit costs almost €1,000 daily.
"We do not need any persuasion over the need of health accounting," Mr Dalli said.
He said the constantly changing health sector required precise accounting to be able to make good forecasts. He referred to the pledge in the budget to allocate €500,000 to employ a number of cost controllers and professionals within the sector to ensure proper accountability.
Natasha Azzopardi Muscat, director general for strategy and sustainability within the ministry, said the sector was facing increasing pressures of expenditure from an ageing population and the development of new technology, among others. She said auditing was also important among human resources, which were very scarce.