A National Patient Safety Strategy for Malta 2026–2035
The National Patient Safety Strategy 2026–2035 is Malta’s first national strategy fully dedicated to strengthening patient safety across the health system. It provides a comprehensive, long‑term framework to guide coordinated action on patient safety across both the public and private healthcare sectors at national level.
The strategy was developed by the Ministry for Health and Active Ageing, through the Superintendence of Public Health, with technical support from the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe, its Athens Office for Quality of Care and Patient Safety, and the WHO Patient Safety Flagship Office at WHO Headquarters in Geneva.
The strategy sets out a unified, system‑wide approach to improving the safety and quality of care for all patients in Malta. It brings together national priorities, international best practices, and the experiences and perspectives of patients and healthcare professionals. At its core, the strategy promotes a just culture in healthcare, one that is based on transparency, accountability, learning, and continuous improvement.
The National Patient Safety Strategy 2026–2035 focuses on six priority areas:
- Strengthening governance structures for patient safety
- Embracing a patient safety and learning culture at all levels of the health system
- Strengthening the safety of clinical and care processes
- Supporting the health workforce to delivery of high quality and safe care
- Engaging and empowering patients and communities for safer, more effective, and people‑centred services
- Harnessing research and innovation for patient safety
Strategy for Health-Enhancing Physical Activity (HEPA) 2025-2030
The Vision of the Strategy for Health-Enhancing Physical Activity (HEPA) 2025-2030 is for every Maltese resident to have the knowledge, the awareness, the best possible opportunities, and an enabling social, cultural, and physical environment for health-enhancing physical activity across the life course and in all life settings. Every person, including children, adolescents, adults and older persons, will have the opportunity to engage in health-enhancing physical activity and reap the health benefits that daily physical activity confers. The strategy seeks to promote health-enhancing physical activity in all life settings including the places where people live, play, learn and work. These settings include community life, neighbourhoods, schools and educational settings, and the workplace. Physical activity is one of eight priority areas for action in the Non-Communicable Diseases Prevention Framework. The strategy will adopt a whole-of-government and a whole-of-society approach to promoting health-enhancing physical activity, recognising the role that all stakeholders play to promote health-enhancing physical activity and ensure the best possible health outcomes for people in Malta.
Malta’s Non-Communicable Disease (NCD) Prevention Framework (2025-2035) sets out a whole-of-government strategy to reduce premature deaths from NCDs by 25% by 2030, in line with WHO targets. It focuses on governance, data-driven action, health equity, reoriented health systems, health literacy, and emergency preparedness. Priority areas include reducing tobacco and alcohol use, tackling obesity through healthier diets and physical activity, improving early diagnosis, integrating mental health, and addressing environmental determinants. The framework stresses multisectoral collaboration, population-wide prevention, and community empowerment, supported by monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to ensure progress and accountability.
A Whole School Approach to A Healthy Lifestyle: Healthy Eating and Physical Activity Policy – 2015
A Whole School Approach to A Healthy Lifestyle: Healthy Eating and Physical Activity Policy aims to promote healthy eating and physical activity in the whole school community. The Policy takes a two-pronged approach – the promotion of healthy eating, and the promotion of physical activity – and gives high priority to these two themes through holistic education; it strengthens the necessary framework and supports an enabling school environment to help the whole school community to adopt healthier patterns of living by encouraging physical activity; it promotes healthy foods and limits the availability of products high in salt, sugar and fats; it empowers children to achieve the required physical and health literacy, to adopt a healthy lifestyle from an early age and to make informed choices about their lifestyles throughout the life course; it makes provision for a flexible curriculum which highlights health, nutrition, food safety and hygiene and food preparation, and promotes physical activity; and it ensure that clear and consistent messages about food, drink and physical activity are delivered across the school day.
National Breastfeeding Policy And Action Plan 2015-2020
The National Breastfeeding Policy and Action Plan 2015-2020 seeks to ensure that children get the very best possible start in life by being provided with natural nutrients through breastfeeding that enhance healthy growth and development. Furthermore, it recognises the right that all mothers have for receiving clear and impartial information which enables them to make fully informed choices on how to feed their baby. The policy recognises the biological, health, social, cultural, environmental and economic importance of breastfeeding. It also provides direction for priorities and action at all levels of Government, working in partnership with mothers and society to promote, protect, support and maintain breastfeeding. The policy seeks to increase both the initiation of breastfeeding rates at hospital discharge and its exclusive continuation for the first six months.
Food and Nutrition Policy and Action Plan for Malta 2015 – 2020
The National Food and Nutrition Policy and Action Plan, developed by an intersectoral working group, set out to identify priority action areas in order to address the main public health challenges facing the Maltese Nation in the area of nutrition and food security. A whole-of-government and the whole of society approach has been taken in order to effectively coordinate policies and actions in other non-health sectors that could have an impact on health. The Policy and Action Plan takes an across the life-span approach starting from pregnancy to old age. This Policy and Action Plan complements the Healthy Weight for Life Strategy (2012), the National Cancer Plan (2011), and the Noncommunicable Disease Control Strategy for Malta (2011) which all include a focus on improving dietary habits in order to maximise health and well-being.
Communicable Disease Control Strategy for Malta 2013
The National Communicable Diseases Control Strategy sets out to describe the scope and nature of the threat posed by infectious diseases to the health of the population of Malta and establish the priorities for action to combat the present as well as possible future threat posed by infectious diseases. The Strategy emphasises the need for the co-ordination of national surveillance for the planning and prioritisation of interventions, the optimal use of laboratory science in communicable disease management and the availability of an effective response capacity for outbreaks of national significance.
A Healthy Weight for Life: A National Strategy for Malta 2012-2020
A Healthy Weight for Life: A National Strategy for Malta 2012 – 2020 seeks to address the many challenges we are experiencing to maintain a healthy weight across the population. It aims to halt the rising overweight and obesity rates and eventually to decrease the number of people suffering from this condition, subsequently reducing morbidity and mortality from related conditions and healthcare and productivity costs and aiming towards an improved quality of life. In order to promote healthy eating, a number of priority areas for action were identified, these include among others:
- to improve the availability and uptake of a healthy diet by the Maltese population through healthy public policies across Government;
- to promote exclusive breast feeding for the first six months of life and to continue breastfeeding in the first years of life;
- to support schools and families so that meals and snacks, including drinks, prepared for school aged children are nutritious and appetising, without being energy-dense and/or containing excess amounts of fats, trans-fatty acids, salt and sugar;
- to support schools to implement the recommendations of the Whole School Approach to a Healthy Lifestyle: Healthy Eating and Physical Activity and to strengthen the Personal and Social Development (PSD) and Home Economics curricula as related to nutrition and healthy choices. In order to promote physical activity, the following priority areas for action identified included amongst others:
- to increase physical activity through healthy public policies, so that the living environment is one that promotes healthy choices;
- to implement the recommendation of three hours of physical activity weekly for all schoolchildren;
- to support Local Councils to increase the opportunities available for physical activity, including the use of legislation and enforcement to improve safety on the roads, availability of open spaces and increase walkability in built-up areas.
Prevention, Control and Management of Tuberculosis: A National Strategy for Malta – 2012
Prevention, Control and Management of Tuberculosis: A National Strategy for Malta aims to detect at the early stages and to effectively treat all active TB disease, to reduce both the incidence of TB infection (risk group management and prevention of transmission of infection) as well the prevalence of TB infection (outbreak management and targeted preventive treatment). These aims are achieved mainly through increased and sustained political commitment to TB and professional and public awareness, through maintenance of high quality surveillance and targeting of vulnerable populations and risk groups, by decreasing the burden of TB/HIV co-infection by strengthening the collaboration of TB and HIV programmes and activities and by maintaining a high quality clinical services.
National Sexual Health Strategy – 2011
The National Sexual Health Strategy, developed through a process of consultation and agreed priority areas, set a model for service provision and education based on standards and guidelines that meet the needs of the population. The Strategy lays down actions aimed at improving prevention, information, education and services to all people of all ages and backgrounds and to address and reduce inequalities in sexual health.
The National Sexual Health Policy for the Maltese Islands – 2010
The National Sexual Health Policy for the Maltese Islands seeks to promote sexual health as an essential and integral element of the holistic notion of human well being. The policy draws on a set of principles of individual and social rights and responsibilities of the human being, underpinned by the values of respect and dignity towards human life from the moment of conception, and on the belief that the family unit is the cornerstone of a healthy society, respectful of social, sexual, religious and cultural diversity. The sexual health policy identifies a number of social and behavioural sexual health indicators which call for more preventive and interventional health services.
A Strategy for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Disease in Malta – 2010
A Strategy for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Disease in Malta, in line with the Health Ministry’s main objective and strategic directions in improving health and the quality of life in the Maltese population, adopts a multifactorial approach to NCD prevention, reduction and control through tackling common risk factors targeting both population-level and high-risk groups. The risk factors addressed in the Strategy include: unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, tobacco, alcohol, obesity, raised Blood Sugar, raised blood pressure and raised serum lipids. The noncommunicable diseases targeted include Cardiovascular, Respiratory, Musculoskeletal, Cancer and Mental Illness. The action plan reflects multi-sectorial and multidisciplinary approaches.