To ask the Minister of Health to detail (i) the support available for patients with arthritis awaiting surgery, including pain-management and emotional support; (ii) how a patient’s expected timeline for surgery is communicated to them; and (iii) what steps he is taking to reduce waiting times for orthopaedic surgery.

(i) In order to support the large number of people living with pain, while awaiting surgery, the Northern Ireland Pain Forum has been established. The aim of this forum is to develop and improve services across Northern Ireland (NI) for people living with a wide range of painful health conditions. The membership of this forum spans voluntary organisations such as Versus Arthritis, Healthy Living Centres, service users and clinicians from many disciplines and organisations including primary and secondary care.

All HSC Trusts offer pain and condition management programmes when access criteria are met for those individuals with a range of physical and mental health conditions, including chronic pain, and GPs continue to provide core services to their registered patients including access to allied health professional services, such as physiotherapy. Funding is also being provided to Versus Arthritis and the Healthy Living Centre Alliance to deliver self-management programmes in order to support adults living with all forms of persistent pain and long-term health conditions, including those on waiting lists.

(ii)When a patient is told that they require surgery, they are advised of the indicative timescale in which that surgery is likely to take place. In NI patients are managed chronologically, based on their clinical need, with urgent patients seen and treated first and management of waiting lists being one of the mechanisms that upholds the principle of equity of access to HSC services. Patients can ask for an updated indicative timescale at any time, and Trusts will normally make contact with the patient close to the time when a date for surgery can be offered.

(iii)One of the key actions of the Elective Care Framework which I published in June 2021 is the delivery of a recovery plan for orthopaedics by the Northern Ireland Orthopaedic Network, which will set out the priority actions, targets and timescales to bring orthopaedic activity back to commissioned levels and to increase activity as rapidly as possible.

In April my Department commissioned a rapid independent external review of the regional orthopaedic service in NI, to identify proposals for the immediate recovery of the service. The Review was undertaken by a team from the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH), Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) Projects Directorate.

The report detailed 21 recommendations, which were designed to increase activity in the short term with the overall aim of building a sustainable service for the future. All 21 recommendations have been fully accepted by the Department, and work is already well underway to implement these.

The recommendations describe the need to ring fence staff and beds for elective orthopaedics, and for the creation of an Orthopaedic Elective Surgery Recovery Board to provide oversight to Trusts throughout the rebuild process.

The Recovery Board is now established and operational, and through collaboration across all Trusts, I am confident that we will see a return to pre-COVID levels of activity in Musgrave Park Hospital by 1 November 2022, and as quickly as possible at the other sites.

I welcome the findings of the review, and am fully committed to ensuring that elective orthopaedic activity is scaled up and that that we can successfully rebuild the service to ensure that patients receive much needed orthopaedic treatment as quickly as possible.

Additional capacity has also been secured outside of the HSC through the Independent Sector (IS) to help patients on HSC waiting lists receive treatment more quickly. For example, an insourcing arrangement is currently underway in the South West Acute Hospital (SWAH) in Western Trust. Through this arrangement, an IS provider is using HSC facilities to treat patients on orthopaedic waiting lists for hip replacement surgery.