It will be the great challenge of this legislature, as President Pedro Sánchez explained, although the powers do not fall to the Ministry of Health. But he has announced that he will design a specific program that communities that want to join can join. And the waiting lists do not stop growing, especially non-urgent surgeries.
According to the latest data from the Ministry of Health, historical highs have been reached. Almost 820,000 patients (exactly 819,944) wait an average of 112 days to undergo surgery in June 2023, only one day less than in that month of 2022. That is 77,446 more people than a year before. The waiting list for outpatient consultations has decreased only slightly (78.47 out of every 1,000 patients are on the waiting list compared to 79.30 in June 2022)
The surgical waiting list has increased in terms of the number of patients, compared to June 2022, who, although they wait one day less on average (from 113 it has gone to 112) they still have an excessive delay and on the other hand the percentage waiting more than 6 months it has dropped only 2 tenths (going from 17.6 to 17.4%), according to the Federation for the Defense of Public Health. By specialties, those with the most waiting lists are Traumatology, Ophthalmology and General and Digestive Surgery.
By autonomous communities, those with the longest waiting time are the Canary Islands (153 days), Extremadura (147) and Andalusia (139). These are also the ones with the highest percentage of patients who wait more than six months to undergo surgery (around 25%). In Catalonia, 23.7% of those on the waiting list exceed the time to undergo surgery for more than six months.
The specialty with the longest average waiting time continues to be Plastic Surgery with 225 days, followed by Neurosurgery with 192 days and Traumatology, whose patients have been waiting an average of 133 days. Cardiac surgery, with 58 days, and Dermatology and Ophthalmology, with 66 and 78 days, respectively, are the specialties with the shortest average waiting times.
On the other hand, in the first half of 2023, 108,037 fewer surgical interventions were performed than in the same period of 2019, "that is, pre-pandemic activity has not been recovered," indicates this organization.
Regarding the 11 clinical processes that are specifically monitored in this information system, they have an average waiting time of 88 days. The average delay recorded for cataracts, one of the most frequent processes, is 68 days. The intervention for benign prostate hypertrophy takes 119 days and the operation for hallux valgus (“bunions”) takes 121 days.
As of June 30, 2023, 78.47 out of every 1,000 people were registered on a waiting list for a first consultation with a Specialized Hospital Care physician. This rate is similar to that of June 2022. The average waiting time for these patients is 87 days, 8 points higher than the June 2022 cut-off and without having yet returned to the pre-pandemic figures of June 2019 (81 days).
The specialties with the longest waiting times are: Neurology with 118 days, Dermatology with 99 days and Traumatology with 90 days. The shortest times are observed in General Surgery with an average waiting time for consultation of 54 days and in Gynecology with 58 days.
