‘Incredible pain’: Joint surgery rate rising as public hospitals fail to keep up

With surgery wait times rising nationally, the Australian Orthopaedic Association has warned joint replacements could spiral past three year public delays.

Joint replacement surgeries are rising year-on-year due to an ageing population, with public hospitals failing to meet demand and leaving health outcomes on the decline as a result. Picture: Jay Town

Surgeons have warned wait times for joint replacements are set to rise, with problems in both public and private hospitals.

The Australian Orthopaedic Association estimates the number of knee replacements is up by 19 per cent, shoulder replacements up 14 per cent and hips up 9 per cent over the last 12 months.

Surgeons registered to the AOA National Joint Replacement Registry this week mark the two millionth replacement since the scheme’s inception and while patients such as Gordon Parrish praise their work, they warn wait times could get worse.

Mr Parrish, 56, is the principal of Robertson Public School in the NSW Southern Highlands and lived with extreme pain in both knees for almost three years.

“It is a long time to have to wait in incredible pain,” Mr Parrish said. “There’s a little bit of depression involved. As a bloke, you like to do your bit around the house, and having to surrender the lawn mowing was pretty hard for me.”

Robertson Public School Principal Gordon Parrish, who received joint replacement surgery to both knees in 2022.

Originally concerned with the price of surgery in the private system, Mr Parrish opted to wait for an opening on the public wait list, but after almost 18 months he gave up.

“I was a bit baulked by the cost of it, at that particular point in time, to go private,” he said. “So we thought we’d wait. In the end, I decided I can’t do this anymore.

“Within a month we were in the private option at Southern Highlands private hospital.”

The excess was $11,000 over their private health cover. AOA president Michael Johnson ­attributed the current rise in surgeries to a Covid backlog, but said ­future rates of arthritis, obesity and diabetes, along with an ageing population, would put further strain on the system.

The AOA reported a decline in joint replacement surgeries through public hospitals, but registry director Paul Smith said recent brawls between private hospitals and health insurers indicated the need to maintain a ­robust public sector.

“The public hospital infrastructure is lagging behind what is needed to undertake the elective surgery load, and that’s spilling over into private hospitals,” Dr Smith said. “It’s a matter of having that sophisticated infrastructure gradually grow to manage the load and that means an ongoing investment.

“If the private sector went out of business tomorrow, the public sector would collapse. So you ­really need to have a proportional awareness of the needs of both sectors.”

He estimated average wait time for surgery in the public system was three years.

“There’s a massive penalty for waiting too long, because you’re unable to be mobile, and if you lose mobility, you put on weight,” he said. “Your risks of diseases like diabetes, heart disease, blood pressure, all those things become a problem, and so the complexity of patients goes up. The data is quite unequivocal that people in the public sector start in a far more disabled state.

“It’s really all about the deterioration that happens while they’re on the waiting list.”