Newly appointed Social Policy Minister John Dalli aims to improve community care, which he believes can lead to reducing waiting lists for those needing treatment in hospital.

Mr Dalli was addressing the media during a visit to Mater Dei Hospital, accompanied by Parliamentary Secretary for Health Joe Cassar, and the Parliamentary Secretary for Care of the Elderly, Mario Galea.

He praised the hospital and its facilities, and stated that it is a structure that will play a great part in the improvement of the healthcare service. However, he admitted that the healthcare sector was still facing problems that needed to be dealt with. When quizzed about the issue of an overcrowded hospital with too few beds, Mr. Dalli pledged to tackle the problem at its root.

“We need to find the cause of this problem, not merely implement stop-gap solutions with the problem re-surfacing at a later date,” he said. “One of our main ideas to solve this issue is to improve community care, so that patients who can be cured without needing to enter hospital will be cured outside hospital. In this way, we will free up beds and reduce waiting lists for patients who truly require hospital treatment.”

Mr Dalli said his visit would serve primarily as an assessment of the area, seeing as the Mater Dei hospital is the main entity to be managed within his ministry. He argued that “customer satisfaction is measured by the patient, and by the degree to which the patients’ needs are met”, and such a visit allows for direct, personal feedback from patients. He held that the main focus of the health sector should be the patient, and the way in which it can provide the best service to its patients.

Mr Dalli stood by the Nationalist Party’s pre-electoral promise that healthcare would remain free of charge. “Health will remain free, and will be rendered sustainable by implementing better organisation in order to reduce costs and wasted resources,” he said. Describing himself as a man who constantly seeks new ways to deal with challenges, he said he would not hesitate to implement new practices if he deemed they would prove beneficial in improving service and reducing expenditure.

In a comment that may be considered a tacit admission of previous administrative deficiencies, Mr Dalli acknowledged that many of the healthcare sector’s problems can be dealt with by better administration and improving resource management – issues that Mr Dalli said were high on his ministry’s agenda.

The minister and two parliamentary secretaries later also visited St Vincent de Paul home for the elderly.