- Study has found NHS has not even started to catch up on shortfall since Covid
- By end of 2022, almost three-quarters of a year of planned operations was lost
- The gap between demand and surgeries continues to increase, the study found
It could take decades to catch up with the roughly 160,000 joint replacement operations lost since the pandemic, experts have found.
Their study said the NHS has not even started to close the shortfall of procedures – including hip and knee replacements – that grew during Covid.
Researchers analysed National Joint Registry (NJR) data on NHS and privately funded hip, knee, shoulder, elbow, and ankle replacement operations between January 2019 and December 2022.
They found by the end of 2022 almost three quarters of a year of planned operations – 71.6 per cent of 2019 activity and 158,994 joint replacements – had been lost.
Rather than showing signs of recovery, the gap between demand and surgeries continues to increase, they warned.
It could take decades to catch up with the roughly 160,000 joint replacement operations lost since the pandemic, experts have found (file photo)
By the end of 2022 almost three quarters of a year of planned operations – 71.6 per cent of 2019 activity and 158,994 joint replacements – had been lost (file photo)
Michael Whitehouse, Professor of Trauma and Orthopaedics at Bristol Medical School and senior clinical lead for the paper, said expanding capacity would still take years to catch up.
He said: ‘If capacity was immediately expanded by five per cent on top of 2019 levels it would take until 2040 to address the backlog.
‘An immediate ten per cent expansion, if possible, would still take until 2031 to catch up.
‘This represents a severe challenge that is currently underestimated in planning and provision that requires prioritisation to mitigate the impact of debilitating joint related conditions on patients.’
The University of Bristol team found that while the private sector had increased provisions to 127 per cent of pre-Covid levels, the NHS was still only operating at 73.2 per cent.
It means that as of 2022, the private sector became the main provider of joint replacements accounting for 53 per cent of procedures in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Wales and Northern Ireland have been worse affected than England with both recording a backlog of more than a year’s worth of operations between 2020-2022.
This stood at 136 per cent of 2019 for Wales and 121.3 per cent for Northern Ireland, compared with 66.7 per cent in England, according to the findings in The Bone & Joint Journal.
Tim Wilton, Medical Director of the NJR, said: ‘There is a clear need to plan and adjust service volumes based on this insight and research, so that patient waiting list numbers start to reduce across the different joints.’
He added: ‘These data, being based against the volume of cases done in 2019, are likely to be an underestimate of the catching-up required as the volume of cases was growing every year before 2019 rather than being static.’
Michael Whitehouse, Professor of Trauma and Orthopaedics at Bristol Medical School and senior clinical lead for the paper, said expanding capacity would still take years to catch up (stock pic)
