NSW public hospitals restart elective surgery after seven-week pause

Long-awaited hip and knee replacements, hernia repairs and other overnight elective surgeries are recommencing at Sydney’s public hospitals, seven weeks after they were paused to help the state’s health system cope with rising coronavirus cases.

Under the new rules, to take effect on Monday, public hospitals will aim to take on up to 75 per cent of their usual elective surgery capacity, subject to their individual circumstances.

Health Minister Brad Hazzard said restrictions could not be fully eased as the pandemic was not over, with thousands of new coronavirus cases being recorded in NSW each day.

“It’s not as if Omicron has disappeared, so there still needs to be some capacity – particularly in the public health system,” he said.

Elective surgery restrictions on private hospitals will be dropped one week later, with those hospitals first moving to an 85 per cent cap, in addition to public operations being done in private facilities.

NSW placed restrictions on elective surgery in public and private hospitals on January 10, limiting procedures to only the most urgent operations and those which could be completed as day surgery. Private hospitals were allowed to recommence at 75 per cent of their capacity one month later.

“It may not be emergency, but it can still be really important surgery for people,” Mr Hazzard said of the procedures impacted.

NSW Health said some public hospitals across the state had already resumed non-elective surgery, with the majority on track to reach 75 per cent capacity or higher in the coming weeks.

There were 1144 COVID-positive people in hospital on Friday, including 64 in intensive care, compared to 1381 in hospital and 92 in intensive care one week ago.

Payal Mukherjee, NSW chair of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, said there would be significant limits on how quickly hospitals could make it through their backlogs. The state’s elective surgery waitlist reached 92,000 people last September, the month before restrictions introduced to free up hospital capacity during the Delta wave were eased.

“We are still recovering from Delta,” she said. “Then there’s the circumstances today. You’ll have a list, and maybe some of your patients have COVID or are isolating, so they have to cancel.”

Associate Professor Mukherjee said there were also decisions to be made about when patients could safely be admitted for elective surgery after recovering from COVID-19. More than 1 million NSW residents have reported positive tests since the start of 2022.

“Based on the Delta data, the advice is to wait eight weeks after someone has COVID before going in for an elective surgery, but those rules don’t necessarily apply to Omicron ... we are getting new data every day that will impact that clinical advice.”