According to the AIHW, the number of patients who underwent elective surgery in 2021–22 has fallen to the lowest levels in over a decade.
Information on public hospital elective surgery waiting times and emergency department care in 2021–22 was released 7 December 2022, on the AIHW’s MyHospitals platform, and included national, state and territory, local hospital network and hospital-specific data.
It showed that the number of elective surgeries performed in 2021–22 was the lowest since 2010–11, when 627,200 admissions from public hospital elective surgery waiting lists occurred.
Across Australia, all jurisdictions except Tasmania saw a reduction in elective surgery admissions, with the largest decreases seen in NSW (27%) and WA (23%), while Victoria experienced a much longer period of reduced activity thanks to extended COVID restrictions.
AIHW spokesperson, sociologist, and head of the Health Systems Group, Dr Adrian Webster, said that Australia wide, the drop in the number of elective surgeries was associated with disruptions to hospital services that occurred during the pandemic.
“In 2021–22, public hospitals performed 623,000 elective surgeries, 131,600 (17%) fewer compared to the previous year,” Dr Webster said.
“This followed periodic suspensions of lower-urgency elective surgery starting from March 2020, which have aimed to help ensure the health system maintains adequate capacity during the pandemic.
“In 2020–21, as the first round of elective surgery restrictions were eased in most states and territories, a concerted effort was made to clear the backlog, which led to strong growth in the number of elective surgeries performed in that year in most states and territories, with Victoria being a notable exception due to ongoing COVID outbreaks.
“During 2021–22, as outbreaks became widespread across the nation, suspensions took hold again, causing disruptions to the delivery of health care services.”
Among those who were admitted from a public hospital waiting list, exactly half of all patients were admitted for their procedures within 40 days, down from 48 days the previous year, with the proportion of patients who waited longer than 365 days to be admitted at 6.3%, down from 7.6% in 2020–21.
However, Dr Webster noted that while the data accurately reflected admissions from public hospital waiting lists, most elective surgeries were actually performed in Australia’s private hospitals, which are currently excluded from contributing data to national estimates for waiting times.
New data on emergency department (EDs) care was also released on 7 December 2022, which showed there were 8.79 million presentations in 2021–22, a small decrease from 8.81 million in 2020–21.
“In the five years prior to the COVID pandemic, presentations to public hospital EDs steadily increased by an average of 3.2% per year – however, the pandemic continued to impact the number of presentations throughout 2021–22,” Dr Webster said.
“In 2021 – 22, 67% of patients were seen on time for their urgency category, down from 71% in 2020 – 21, [though] almost all patients in the most urgent category – resuscitation – were seen immediately.”
The data also showed that as COVID case numbers rose in the community, there was an increase in the number of people presenting to EDs with the virus as their principal diagnosis, peaking in August 2021, with 739 average daily presentations, before falling to a low of 261 in November 2021.
The highest peak of 1,682 daily presentations was seen in January 2022, followed by a sharp fall to 545 in February 2022, which increased again to 801 in April 2022 before declining to 469 in June 2022.