The waiting list for minor surgical interventions is expected to be dramatically reduced following an agreement between the government and Saint James Hospital to carry out 130 surgical sessions at the private hospital.
As part of the agreement, state surgeons will make use of theatre space provided by Saint James, along with the services of nurses and anaesthetists.
Patients will be taken from the state waiting list and will not have to pay for the service.
Unveiling the agreement yesterday morning, Health Parliamentary Secretary Chris Fearne said the agreement would address the vast majority of patients who had been waiting for intermediate interventions for more than a year.
Intermediate interventions are those requiring one or two days of hospitalisation and account for up to 75 per cent of all surgeries.
During the last six months, a record 26,500 operations had been carried out, up by more than 1,000 from the same period last year, Mr Fearne said.
He added that Mater Dei hospital had already extended surgery hours to tackle the problem but space had become a limiting factor.
We are proud that the government has always shown support for our services
Questioned about the cost to the government, Mr Fearne said the exact figure was commercially sensitive but was roughly equivalent to the costs of carrying out the same number of operations at Mater Dei.
He also revealed that a new initiative to address major operations would be announced in the coming weeks, while the waiting times for diagnostic interventions such as MRI and CT scans had already been reduced from a matter of years to one of weeks.
The agreement with Saint James follows an expression of interest issued for private hospitals in recent weeks.
Interim CEO Albert Micallef said: “We are proud that as a private hospital the government has always shown support for our services.
“We have always aimed to provide the best possible service to the public and this collaboration will allow us to continue to do so by helping to address the problem of waiting lists.”
Meanwhile, the Nationalist Party said in a statement that the system had been initiated by the previous administration and discontinued by the Labour government.
The PN said the government’s “hard-headedness” in not immediately continuing with the original agreement had led to suffering for a number of patients.