Orthopaedic patients waiting nearly three weeks for surgery due to ACC approval delays

Orthopaedic surgeons say patients are waiting nearly three weeks for surgery due to delays in ACC’s approval process.

Dr Alex Malone, chair of the Orthopaedic Association (NZOA)’s ACC liaison committee, said its members were reporting increasing delays all around the country.

Surgeries could be submitted as “clinically urgent” for faster approval, but in many cases, even non-urgent cases were waiting in pain.

Malone said numbers recently provided to the NZOA by ACC showed the average time taken to approve surgery had gone up from 10 days in 2025 to 18 days this April - an 80 percent increase.

“It’s frustrating for the patients who have further delays to their treatment and rehabilitation, longer time off work,” Malone said.

It was also affecting surgeon’s ability to schedule surgeries. Some surgeons tended to book patients in for surgery before their claim was approved, based on those approval time estimates ACC provided them each quarter, to give patients more certainty.

“Some surgeons would, and some don’t for the reasons that we are talking about - that the approval can be unreliable, it can take some time, it may come back as a no,” Malone explained.

“Often cases aren’t approved until very soon before a planned procedure date,” Malone said. “And that can mean last minute cancellations or incomplete lists being filed, so it’s inefficient use of our limited resources.”

“I think the ones that are doing that are particularly struggling at the moment because a lot of the patients who they would expect to have been approved by that time are actually not approved yet. And so they are having to reschedule them or cancel those procedures for them.”

There were about 400 surgeons working in New Zealand, 75 of them trainees.

Malone said ACC had acknowledged the increasing delays, and was working towards resolving it.

ACC’s Phil Riley, head of service operations, confirmed the data it had recently provided to the Orthopaedic Association showed there had been some recent periods of higher demand that led to a decline in timeliness of decision-making, but that this was improving.

He said over the past two financial years the average time taken to issue a decision on surgery requests had stayed “relatively stable”, from 18 days in the 2024-25 financial year, to 19 days in the 2025-26 financial year to date.

“ACC understands the importance of timely surgery decisions, both to support client recovery and to provide certainty for providers, and we aim to make these decisions as quickly as possible,” he said.

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