How Britons are coping with decades of waiting for hip and knee operations as Covid backlog grows to 160,000

Experts have found it could take decades to make up for the estimated 160,000 joint replacement surgeries missed since the pandemic.

Their study found the NHS has not even begun to close the shortfall in procedures, including hip and knee replacements, that has increased during Covid.

Researchers analysed data from the National Joint Register (NJR) on NHS-funded and privately funded hip, knee, shoulder, elbow and ankle replacement operations between January 2019 and December 2022.

They found that by the end of 2022, nearly three-quarters of a year of planned operations had been lost (71.6 percent of 2019 activity and 158,994 joint replacements).

Instead of showing signs of recovery, the gap between demand and surgeries continues to widen, they warned.

Michael Whitehouse, professor of trauma and orthopaedics at Bristol Medical School and senior clinical lead on the paper, said scaling up capacity would still take years to achieve.

He said: ‘If capacity were immediately expanded by five per cent above 2019 levels, it would take until 2040 to address the backlog.

‘An immediate expansion of ten percent, if possible, would take until 2031 to achieve the objectives.

‘This represents a serious challenge that is currently under-appreciated in the planning and delivery of services that require 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 benefits to 127 per cent of pre-Covid levels, the NHS was still only operating at 73.2 per cent.

This means that as of 2022, the private sector has become the main provider of joint replacements, accounting for 53 percent of procedures in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Wales and Northern Ireland have been hit harder than England, with both seeing a delay of more than a year in operations between 2020 and 2022.

This figure stood at 136 per cent in 2019 for Wales and 121.3 per cent for Northern Ireland, compared with 66.7 per cent in England, according to the results published in The Bone & Joint Journal.

Tim Wilton, medical director at NJR, said: “There is a clear need to plan and adjust service volumes based on this knowledge and research, so that patient waiting list numbers begin to reduce across different joints.”

He added: “These figures, which are based on the volume of cases treated in 2019, are likely an underestimate of the recovery needed, as case volumes were growing each year prior to 2019 rather than remaining static.”