Temporary changes to support Orthopaedic patients with the best care and experience

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, we had to make changes to our services to support our response to the pandemic, this included reducing the amount of planned orthopaedic surgery we were able to perform. We have made good progress with the recovery of services as we all learn to live with Covid-19. However, unfortunately, we have a number of patients who are waiting longer than we would like for their more complex orthopaedic surgery.

Therefore, we are making a temporary change to how we deliver our orthopaedic surgery services to help reduce the waiting time for these patients.

This means that during July to October we will carry out orthopaedic surgery at University Hospital of North Durham and Darlington Memorial Hospital. These are our two main acute sites which have a full range of support services and therefore support the delivery of the more complex surgery.

There will be a very small number of patients who are currently booked for surgery at Bishop Auckland Hospital and we will be in touch with them directly to discuss rearranging their appointments.

The Trust is committed to service provision at Bishop Auckland Hospital and within our plans for this year, we have outlined this commitment to the centre of excellence at the hospital for orthopaedic surgery. This would be a temporary change only to support the management of the current position and improve the experience of the cohort of long waiters at this time. It is proposed therefore that elective orthopaedic in-patient surgery would begin to take place at Bishop Auckland Hospital in late autumn.