According to data shown on the National Hospital Directorate’s list, the number of those who are waiting for surgery exceeds 26,000. That’s only those who were waiting for more than 60 days.
The website’s list has twenty different treatments listed, and waiting time for half of these exceeds a hundred days. For five medical interventions, the national average waiting time manages to exceed two hundred days (as of the latest Saturday data).
Traumatic statistics
The most populated waiting line on the list is the one for knee surgery. This list winds up at the dizzying number of 11,300. Remember, these numbers only represent those who are already waited out their share of two months. Even so, out of this large group of people, 9,837 are in orthopedic care and 1,463 in traumatology.
The waiting time for these two categories is counted separately. In the former, the average waiting time, based on the last six months nationwide, is 263 days. This means that if a patient was added to the waiting list yesterday, on January 6th, for example, they can expect surgery around the end of September.
However, these numbers vary from region to region. If they subscribed to the list in the Western region of the country (which means Győr-Moson-Sopron, Vas, and Zala counties), the average waiting time already jumps up to a steep 430 days. That is, if a patient was added to the waiting list now, their expected knee replacement would be around March 10, 2025.
However, if the knee surgery is logged as being in traumatology, the process is much faster: 229 days nationally and only 407 days in the Western region.
The two ends
Based on the currently available lists and their calculated average waiting times from the last 6 months, the longest waiting time is for those who wish to undergo corneal surgery. According to the National Hospital Directorate’s data, this kind of interventions are only carried out at the Semmelweis University Clinical Center, marking the record average waiting time of 482 days. Meaning that patients who are added to the waiting list now may be scheduled for surgery in May 2025. There are currently around 350 people waiting for more than 60 days for a corneal surgery.
Overall, for the twenty conditions listed on the website, the average waiting time is about 130 days. Nose sinus surgery plays a significant role in the average waiting time. This, it seems, is a line that proceeds extremely fast. Here, no one waits more than sixty days, and on average, they are scheduled within 12 days. Without the nose sinus surgery, the national average waiting time would be over 140 days, approximately four and a half months.
How much longer?
The National Hospital Directorate’s website keeps track of waiting lists. Here, a total of 20 different treatments are listed, which at first may sound like a lot, but it’s not. Last year on the same website, there were 47 different interventions with their waiting lists published. The National Hospital Directorate did not comment on the decrease of the listed surgeries, writes 444.
This is one of the tricks used by the government to reduce the numbers on the waiting lists to make the situation seem lighter. Another well-used one is the way of them only listing those who were waiting for a brief two months, and showing them in the data only after this period.
This means the situation may be even worse than it seems now. The national waiting list for surgeries already equals that of a smaller Hungarian town like Jászberény. How much longer could the actual waiting list be?