Australia’s private hospitals are essential to address the surge of essential elective surgery when restrictions ease, a peak industry body has said. The number of patients on Australia’s public hospital elective surgery waiting lists increased during 2020–21 as hospitals dealt with a backlog caused by COVID-19 in the previous year. “To ensure the health system maintained adequate capacity to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, non-urgent elective surgery was suspended nationally in March 2020. This reduced the number of elective surgeries performed in the 2019–20 reporting period and contributed to creating a ‘backlog’ of surgeries that had been delayed,” AIHW spokesperson Dr. Adrian Webster said in a statement. According to new data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), the median wait time for elective surgery has increased by a week from 41 days before the pandemic (2018-19) to 48 days in 2020-21. The proportion of patients who waited longer than 365 …