A "tsunami of people" are waiting for elective surgery due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in what the peak doctors' body says is an "unseen tragedy".
Repeated lockdowns and elective surgery bans during the pandemic have forced hundreds of thousands of people to wait even longer for life-changing, sometimes life-saving treatments.
State governments manage public hospital waiting lists and they have called for the federal government to increase its share of public hospital funding to deal with pandemic-related backlogs.
Chris Moy, Australian Medical Association (AMA) vice president, said elective surgery waiting lists were an "unseen tragedy" of the pandemic.
"Elective surgery makes it sound like it's flippant, the reality is most elective surgery is essential," Dr Moy said.
"We need to come up with a plan to get ahead, a post-disaster recovery plan, which is the sort of thinking we have after every bushfire."
Eddy Schaap has been waiting more than a year for surgery to ease the tingling and sharp shooting pain he feels in his left arm from carpal tunnel syndrome.
"I take some heavy-duty painkillers," the 73-year-old said.
"If the waiting time was reduced to three or four or five months, that would be a lot more acceptable."
Mr Schaap is still working as a handyman but the pain makes it very difficult.
"When I do work, the pain is there, the discomfort, the tingling is there, pretty much from the shoulder down," he said.
Wait times deteriorated significantly during the first year of the pandemic, according to the most recent data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
Doctors, healthcare workers and patient advocates say the situation has worsened since then, with wait times blowing out even further.
"Over the last few weeks, we've had so many concerning phone calls," Stephen Mason, chief executive officer of the Australian Patients Association said.
"All around Australia, hospitals are in trouble, waiting times have blown out."
It means patients risk waiting longer for procedures including joint replacements and heart surgery.
The most recent national data from the first year of the pandemic (2020-2021) shows wait times increased for almost every surgical procedure.
The average time it took for a patient to access cataract surgery jumped from 98 days in 2019-2020 to 172 days in 2020-2021.
Where a patient lives also impacts the likelihood of accessing timely care.
For hip replacement surgery in the first year of the pandemic, the typical wait time was 328 days in Tasmania and 271 days in NSW.
Wait times were far better in Victoria (119 days) and Western Australia (124 days), according to data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
NSW and Tasmania recorded the worst wait times for most procedures.
In Victoria, some hospitals have cancelled non-urgent elective surgeries, as they struggled with staff shortages and an increase in patients.
"People think about the number of COVID deaths, but we really should be considering the number of deaths from delayed care such as delayed elective surgery, and also increased suffering caused by it as well," Dr Moy said.
