Alex Trelinski
WAITING lists for a non-emergency public hospital operation in Spain reached 793,521 last December 31- the highest figure on record.
The Ministry of Health said that’s an increase of 86,781 compared to the end of 2021 and 51,003 more than in June 2022.
The national average wait for an operation is 122 days compared to 121 a year earlier but nine days longer than last June.
Waiting times in Madrid are just 63 days followed by the Basque Country(73) and Galicia(73).
The longest waits are in Castilla-La Mancha and the Canary Islands with 157 days, closely followed by Extremadura, Cantabria, and Catalunya.
A Health Ministry statement said that ‘the average waiting time is very similar to that of December 2021’, when surgical activity started to recover in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and ‘even better that dates before the start of the pandemic’.
Nevertheless, 22% of patients have been waiting more than six months to be operated on , which is worse than a year earlier(20.3%) and June 2022, when the percentage was 17.6%.
The biggest speciality with patients awaiting a procedure is Traumatology with 190,990 people in line, compared to 177,239 a year earlier.
That’s followed by Ophthalmology with 172,093 patients (150,355 in December 2021).
READ MORE:
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- Spain’s hospital operation waiting lists are longest in 18 years
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