How many joint replacements..

LIFETIME HIP & KNEE

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#123: How many Joint replacements?

We read lot about healthcare getting more expensive..

When it comes to joint replacement, a really good Dutch paper put some numbers on why this is, by asking the simple question..

How many people are living with a joint replacement?

The authors used

..to estimate the number of people alive with at least one joint replacement. Each year over the last 30 years.

AND LOOK AT THIS GRAPH..

I find that graph remarkable...

Over the last 70 years (about a human lifetime)..

We have gone from no one with a joint replacement to..

..an ever increasing number of people.

And how is Healthcare adapting?

The answer from paper number 2 this week.. is..

If we look at the number of joint replacements performed each year over the last 10 years in England, Wales and Northern Ireland..

..we can see that we're trying to keep up..

(the black line was sloping up)

Then COVID took a big bite out of what we were able to do.

AND by 2022 the health service had still not recovered.

The authors then went a step further to look at..

How we get back on track..

That is, how long will it for the waiting lists to recover if we increase our service by a certain percentage (%)

And by 'increase our service' we mean more theatre time and ward beds.

And that means more people working more hours

And that costs money. So..

So how are we doing since 2022?

A quick look back at my Royal College of Surgeons 'Political Update' tells me about the overall waiting list figures in England..

Most recent figures show in November 2025 the number of people waiting decreased by 86,000..

Not bad. How good is that..?

Well, the number of people waiting for treatment stood at..

7,310,000 people

Whoa..

Now, some of those people will be waiting for more than one treatment.

BUT that figure is still a substantial proportion of our population.

Looking back a bit further, the number of people waiting in..

My reading of those figures is that long waiting lists appear to be here to stay, for a while longer yet..

Next week..

Two papers that surgeons don't often talk about..

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Truro
TR1 3UP
United Kingdom