A record of 45,492 operations were made last year at Mater Dei Hospital in 2012, which is 1,745 more operations that the previous year Minister for Health, the Elderly and Community Care Joe Cassar revealed. This means that 12,000 more operations were conducted in 2012 than the last year of operation at St. Luke’s Hospital

Minister Cassar said that “last year it was thought to be difficult to beat the record number of operations we achieved in 2011, but through hard work from the professionals and workers at Mater Dei, we managed to break that record. I’d like to thank the people who were involved and contributed to this”.

The Ministry in collaboration with the National Blood Transfusion Centre would like to encourage people to keep donating blood.

Spokesman for the National Blood Transfusion Centre Alex Aquilina said that “if we don’t have enough blood, then we can’t perform all the required operations, so it’s important to give”.