Twenty per cent of the new beds planned for Mater Dei Hospital will be in place by the end of the month, Health Parliamentary Secretary Chris Fearne said yesterday during a visit to two new wards at the hospital.

The wards were built over the past 10 months next to the Accident and Emergency Department.

The original plan, to build the wards in the emergency department, had to be scrapped due to structural problems with the concrete in certain parts of the building.

Instead, the new orange-coded wing, called Medical Assessment Unit, was built between the mortuary and the A&E Department. The project cost €11.5 million, €9 million of which came from European Regional and Development Fund. This unit will host patients for a maximum of 48 hours, while they are undergoing tests and being diagnosed. They will then be discharged or allocated a bed within another ward. The new wards will take in patients on November 2.

Meanwhile, the existing wards, Medical Admission Unit 3 and the corridor that was transformed into a permanent ward, known as M7, will be vacated and refurbished, Mr Fearne said.

This means that by the end of February, when the refurbishment is complete, the hospital will be able to host an additional 64 patients.

The government is also planning to increase the number of beds at Mater Dei by 300, so more floors will be built on top of these new wards.

Meanwhile, work will also start on a Hospitality Lounge, which by April will host patients waiting for discharge documents.

These patients currently occupy a bed until friends or relatives collect them, while the actual Admission and Discharge Ward is a corridor, projects director Celia Falzon explained.

She said the new bed management plans also envisaged the creation of an Observation Bay with comfortable seating for patients who did not need to stay the night.

Mr Fearne said some 240 people were admitted to Mater Dei every day, a third of whom were emergency cases.

He said doctors realised there was a bed shortage soon after the migration from St Luke’s, and a fortnight later patients were already being given beds in corridors.

Mater Dei had welcomed its first inpatients in November of 2007, and by December consultants had expressed concern over the number of beds available in surgical wards.

Mr Fearne also said the number of doctors within the emergency department had increased to 34 from 14 in 2012, while there were 109 nurses, up from 76 in 2012.

Sixty new healthcare professionals, 50 of whom are nurses, will man the new wards.