Only 14.5% of patients awaiting MRI will benefit from public-private agreement

Only 550 patients will benefit from the recent public-private partnership for MRI scans, Sunday newspaper Illum reports.

With around 3,800 patients waiting for an MRI scan at Mater Dei Hospital, in April the health ministry announced it reached an agreement with two private hospitals to address the problem.

It now transpires that the agreement will only cater for 275 tests at St James Hospital and another 275 tests at Da Vinci hospital, meaning that only 14.5% of persons on the waiting list will benefit from the scheme.

A spokesperson for the Health ministry refused to confirm these details. She only confirmed the public-private partnership will allow Mater Dei’s resources to be used more efficiently.

“The initiative is on track. In the first weeks, those who were on the waiting list for more than a year were called, we are now dealing with those who have been waiting for between six months and a year,” the spokesperson said.

She refused to delve into whether the government would need to enter into another similar agreement in the near future to keep up with the waiting list, highlighting that the government’s aim is to reduce the waiting time from the actual two years to three months by May 2015.

Read more in today’s issue of Illum.