The government and doctors’ lawyers were finalising two documents that would hopefully soon end a dispute over the concession granted to Vitals Global Healthcare, Times of Malta was told.

One of the documents, said the Medical Association of Malta’s general secretary, Martin Balzan, was “strictly related to Vitals” whereas the other was more “general”.

He would not elaborate, saying he would not like to compromise the talks, which, Dr Balzan said, could be successfully concluded this coming week.

He said he was confident the agreement in the pipeline would be “satisfactory to doctors and will have significant benefits to patients”.

Read: Political parties react as MAM declares doctors' strike a success

The doctors’ union had originally hoped to end negotiations with the government last week after what Dr Balzan described as a “long meeting on Wednesday” when both sides’ concerns were discussed extensively.

A confident Dr Balzan said there were only a few clauses to iron out in the two documents that had been drafted.

Still, he did not rule out the possibility of industrial action, pointing out that the negotiations were not over yet.

“You never know. We hope we don’t have any surprises,” he said.

The MAM accused the government of breaching a collective agreement, which, it insisted, laid down that doctors should have been notified six weeks in advance about the transfer of the St Luke’s, Karin Grech and Gozo General hospitals from Vitals to Steward Health Care, which, it was announced just before Christmas, had purchased the 30-year concession.

The government argued that the agreement had not been broken, saying the contract with Steward was not new. It argued that it was only the ownership of Vitals that changed.

Dr Balzan said that the MAM was no longer insisting that the Vitals agreement be rescinded.

“Our preferred solution would have been for the government to have never given its consent,” he said, adding that the solution found would in principle achieve the same results.