Wait Times

Accessible and timely services is a foundational quality metric guiding our work with healthcare partners.

The wait times shown below are historical and reflect how long patients who recently received a consultation or surgery waited. They are intended to provide information about past performance and should not be interpreted as a prediction of how long a patient referred today will wait.

Wait times can change over time and are influenced by factors such as operating room and clinic capacity, referral volumes, and available resources. An individual patient’s wait may also vary based on clinical urgency, health status and readiness for surgery, surgeon availability and practice patterns, and other individual circumstances.

For these reasons, actual wait times may be shorter or longer than the historical figures shown below.

Hip & Knee Replacement in Alberta

Below are provincial wait times for hip and knee replacements that IIHO recurrently reports on in partnership with Alberta’s orthopaedic clinics and health agencies.

With joint replacements, we measure two different “waiting” periods:

1. the wait for the surgeon consult, and
2. the wait to receive surgery.

These are not passive waiting periods, since treatments and preparation for care are often delivered in this time.

There are several ways to describe waiting times; we use the following:

• LONGEST 10%: (also called the 90th percentile) captures the point at which 90 percent of people received service. It describes the upper limit of time that one can expect to wait.
• AVERAGE: mathematical mean; describes the typical wait one can expect.
• SHORTEST 25%: the point at which the fastest quarter of people received service. This describes the quickest one can expect to wait.

Note: Hover on/select a data point to see the exact value.

How To Reduce the Waiting Time?

Patients can reduce their wait for a consultation or surgery by selecting the next available surgeon at their referred clinic. This option is available at almost all hip and knee clinics in Alberta. To find out if this option is available, patients should speak with the care provider who submitted their referral.

Taking the next available surgeon at the referred clinic can reduce wait by weeks and, in some instances, months. If a patient’s schedule is flexible, they can ask to be put on their care provider’s cancellation list so that when another patient cancels an appointment, they have a chance to fill the slot and reduce the wait time.

Why do wait time numbers differ from other websites?

​These results may differ from those published by other organizations due to the data sources and the criteria used in the analysis. We include all elective, primary hip and knee replacements (i.e. non-urgent surgeries performed on a joint for the first time). We group the cases by the month the patient is discharged from hospital.

This may cause slight differences between reported wait times.