Western Cape government to spend further R20 million to speed up surgery backlogs

The Western Cape Health Department will inject an additional R20 million into provincial hospitals in an effort to reduce the surgical backlog.

According to the province, there is a backlog of approximately 23 000 elective surgeries that have been postponed due to COVID-19.

Department Head Dr. Saadiq Kariem says the money will be used to get extra surgeons and other resources.

During this time, approximately 10 000 patients were forced to wait at home for elective surgeries such as hip replacement, hernia repair, or orthopedic.

Hundreds are waiting in hospitals for their turn.  But some of these injuries sometimes become urgent as a result of complications associated with the waiting period.

Head of Surgeries at Tygeberg Hospital Professor Elmin Steyn says, at the hospital alone, the surgical backlog is in the region of 10 000  patients.

“If you talk about patients that are waiting at home, thousands, if you talk about patients waiting in hospital for urgent surgery, hundreds, but as they wait they become sicker and sicker and the ones that really wait too long, and sometimes it’s a few hours too long, either they die or they become a huge burden to our system and they become the ones lying in our ICU for four weeks.”

COVID-19 impact on surgeries performed 

Prior to COVID, the province performed approximately 165 000 minor and major surgeries each year. The moratorium reduced this figure by more than 20% by December 2021.

Provincial Health Department COO Dr Saadiq Karien says the impact is across all surgical disciplines.

“If we use a subset of that 165 000, the operations more than 30 minutes, traditionally we use that as a proxy for elective, that number is about 105 000 on an annual basis.  If you use 2019 form a baseline for the province and again by December 2021, that backlog was 22% less, in other words, wE did 22 % fewer operations by December 2021 directly because of COVID. So, that’s about just over 23 000.”

Effect of robotic surgery 

Provincial Health Minister, Nomafrench Mbombo says robotic surgery, which kicked off in the province in February has already had a positive impact on patient care and reduction in recovery times.

“ Even before COVID-19 we had quite a long list of different operations, so what we are trying to do now is how we can add more staff and also to make sure that at least we tackle the surgical backlogs just like we are tackling non-COVID  cases like mental health and so forth.”

Groote Schuur Hospital Da Vinci X-i surgical robot to help surgeons perform complex surgeries: 

Tygerberg Hospital performs about 30 000 surgeries per year, most of the emergency surgeries performed after hours.