Original ArticleWaiting for Hip Arthroplasty: Economic Costs and Health Outcomes
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
A prospective study was conducted with 153 patients recruited from orthopedic waiting lists of 3 metropolitan publicly owned hospitals and 1 provincial publicly owned hospital across 3 District Health Boards1
Results
Of 153 participants enrolled in the study, 3 died, 3 were exempted (1 whose surgery was delayed indefinitely, the other 2 were removed from the list), and 1 was still waiting at the completion of the study (this person had waited 28 months). This gave us 146 eligible patients, 20 of whom withdrew from the study for a range of reasons (serious illness/cancer/stroke in themselves [N = 10], serious illness/cancer/stroke in their spouse [N = 4], too busy [N = 5], no longer wanted surgery [N = 1])
Discussion
Mean waiting times for THA were shorter than expected. This was attributed to additional wait-list funding being made available by government during recruitment for this study [21]. Such funding aimed to reduce growing backlogs of patients waiting for elective surgery including THA. However, we did observe that although waiting times for patients recruited into the study were shorter, waiting times lengthened as the study progressed. Reasons for the variability in waiting times for THA between
Conclusions
A limitation of this study may be that patients in the sample utilized 1 provincial and 3 metropolitan hospitals, all of whom are well served by a full complement of orthopedic surgeons and are areas that are associated with a high standard of living [28].
Our finding that initial health status had the strongest influence on outcomes led us to conclude that those patients with poorer initial health status showed greater relative improvement by 6 months post-THA than those with a better
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the grants from Arthritis New Zealand and the Wellington Surgical Research Trust. We thank the participants for their commitment and enthusiasm for this study, and we acknowledge the invaluable support of the surgeons and hospitals' administration.
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Benefits or funds were received in partial or total support of the research materials described in this article from Arthritis New Zealand and Wellington Surgical Research Trust.