The government has rebutted claims by the Medical Association secretary general that the reduction of waiting lists was only an illusion.

Martin Balzan said on Wednesday that the bottleneck had merely been shifted from operations to outpatients. He also claimed that the number of specialists had remained fairly stagnant, describing the number of additional specialists, he added, was a “trickle”.

In a statement issued yesterday following a report in this newspaper, the Parliamentary Secretariat for Health categorically denied Dr Balzan’s claims that lengthy hospital waiting lists led many patients to give up on appointments at Mater Dei last year, saying these were “completely wrong”.

The veteran respiratory physician had said that many patients were waiting for over a year before they were seen by a specialist at the hospital. He went on to say that the reduction in waiting lists was only “an illusion”.

More work needs to be done to reduce outpatient waiting lists

“Patients are now waiting to be diagnosed, so the number waiting to be operated on has been reduced,” Dr Balzan said, adding that the bottleneck had shifted from the surgery to outpatient departments.

Reacting to these claims, a spokeswoman for the Secretariat said that the numbers gave the lie to Dr Balzan’s “mistaken” claims.

While admitting that “more work needs to be done” to reduce outpatient waiting lists, the number of new operations booked following diagnosis had risen substantially over the past years.

Last year, 20,000 new operations had been booked through Outpatients, the secretariat said. This was twice the number of new operations booked in 2012, and four times the 5,000 booked back in 2008.

The secretariat spokeswoman also listed other improvements made across the hospital system, with operations at Mater Dei going up from 36,000 in 2008 to 45,000 in 2012 and 53,000 last year.

In the coming six months, the spokeswoman said, the government would be implementing a detailed plan which would be focusing specifically on reducing the number of patients on the outpatients’ waiting lists. This was expected to come into force by the second half of this year, she said.

The hospital’s activity report, published earlier this week, showed that overall demand for treatment at the hospital was growing. The number of admissions last year reached 90,000, an increase of more than a third over 2008.

The number of specialists was also challenged by the secretariat, which said that over the past two years in Mater Dei alone, the number of specialists had increased by a net amount of 57, over and above those specialists who were brought in to replace those that would be retiring.

However, contacted for a reaction Dr Balzan said the association regularly monitored the Government Gazette to get figures on the number of consultants appointed at Mater Dei.