Scheduled orthopaedic surgeries planned for Tuesday had to be postponed due to the “substantial influx of emergency trauma cases”, according to a health ministry spokesperson.

Times of Malta was informed that scheduled operations at Mater Dei Hospital were being postponed. When contacted a ministry spokesperson said that this was impacting orthopaedic surgeries and "operations are expected to resume as scheduled on Wednesday and patients who were affected with the postponement were given another operation date."

The spokesperson could not provide statistics of the number of operations impacted at the time of writing.

Over the past few days there have been several serious accidents reported in the news. On Tuesday morning a man and a woman were runover in separate accidents within an hour of each other. Another woman was hit by a car in Tarxien.

Late on Monday a 30-year-old motorcyclist was seriously injured when he fell off his vehicle in Valletta Road, Zurrieq. On Sunday three men and two women were hospitalised after two traffic accidents in the Rabat and Mdina areas. Earlier in the day a  motorcyclist was hospitalised after crashing on the Coast Road.

Last month Times of Malta reported that operations and tests at Mater Dei Hospital are being postponed because of problems importing from earthquake-hit Turkey a substance used to screen for cancerous cells. The radioactive tracer is used during PET/CT scans primarily to diagnose cancer patients and monitor the effectiveness of their treatment.

The scans cannot go ahead without the tracer. While the problem with importing the tracer was temporary, it highlighted Malta’s reliance on importing a substance which it could create on the island.

The government owns a multi-million euro machine called a cyclotron that creates the tracer but has been left dormant for years.

“Mater Dei Hospital can also confirm that the tracer issue was only temporary during the first few days following the unfortunate earthquakes in Turkey and that the situation has since been resolved,” the spokesperson said. 

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