Poland's Hip Wait Is 343 Days. Or 69. Both Are Official.

A hip replacement in Slovenia means a median wait of 667 days. In Denmark the figure is 44 days. Both numbers sit in the same OECD database, for the same operation, in the same year, collected under the same programme.¹

That 15-fold gap is the kind of statistic that sells a plane ticket. It is also two different measurements wearing one label.

The OECD collects two separate waiting-time series. Most countries report only one of them.² Which series a country reports changes where it lands in the table. For Poland, the choice moves the number by a factor of five.

Two clocks, one column

The OECD's definitions are precise, and they are not the ones most coverage assumes. Both series start at the same moment: a patient sees a specialist, the specialist decides to operate, and the patient's name goes on the waiting list. What differs is when each clock stops.

"Waiting times from specialist assessment to treatment" runs from the listing date "to the date they were admitted for treatment".² It describes people who got their operation. "Waiting times of patients on the list" runs from the listing date "to a designated census date".² It describes people who are still waiting on one particular day.

Neither series includes the time between a family doctor's referral and the specialist appointment. The OECD excludes that period from both definitions.² A peer-reviewed study of this exact dataset confirms the point. It appeared in Health Policy in 2026, co-authored by the OECD statistician who runs the collection. Both measures, it states, capture only the wait "after the patient has seen a specialist".³

What the 2024 table looks like on each measure

Median waiting days for hip replacement, 2024, from the OECD Health Statistics database.¹ A dash means the country does not report that series.

Read the first column and Poland looks like one of Europe's worst systems, behind only Slovenia. Read the second and Poland sits close to Sweden. The Health Policy study counts seven OECD countries reporting both series and six reporting only treated patients.³ Just two report only the census measure: Ireland and Slovenia.³ The current OECD database still shows the same split.¹

Why the list-based number runs higher

The census measure tends to produce bigger numbers, and the reason is mechanical rather than medical. A census counts everyone sitting on the list on a single day, which means patients treated quickly pass through between censuses and are rarely caught. Patients stuck for years are caught every time. The study puts it plainly: "patients with long waits are oversampled compared to patients with short waits".³

The census measure also keeps counting people who never get the operation at all. Its total includes patients who die while waiting, who go private, or who become too unwell for surgery.³

The two series also move differently under stress. Measured against 2019, the study found the wait on the list rose by 31.0%, 26.8%, 26.9% and 16.1% across the four following years. The wait to treatment rose only slightly over the same period, and that change was not statistically significant.³

The pandemic lengthened the queue far more than it lengthened the journey of those who reached the front of it.

The gaps that survive the correction

Comparing like with like still leaves large differences. Spain, Sweden and Slovenia all report the census measure, and in 2024 their medians were 67.3 days, 67 days and 667 days.¹ That is a tenfold spread on a single definition.

Two independent national sources support the ends of that range. Spain's Ministry of Health publishes hip replacement separately in its national waiting-list system. At 31 December 2025 it recorded 15,256 people waiting, a mean wait of 98 days, and 13.7% waiting more than six months.⁴

The OECD's median for Spain in 2025 is 63.8 days.¹ A mean sitting above a median is what a right-skewed distribution produces. Both sources agree that Spain's waits are short by European standards.

Slovenia's national waiting-times portal, run by its National Institute of Public Health, quotes expected waits for new patients rather than a census of the existing list. Fetched on 20 September 2026, it showed the University Medical Centre in Maribor quoting 1,000 days for a routine hip replacement.⁵

The same hospital quoted 400 days for the "fast" category and 100 days for the most urgent.⁵ Slovenia's problem is not an artefact of the measure.

What the headline numbers leave out

The United Kingdom row is England only. The OECD notes that Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales "are unable to replicate waiting times for patients on the list".² The English figure comes from a weekly management dataset that NHS England describes as "subject to less validation than the monthly accredited official statistics".²

Those accredited monthly statistics put the median wait across all specialties at 12.9 weeks at the end of November 2025. They also count treatment pathways rather than people. On that count, 7.3 million pathways belonged to roughly 6.2 million patients.⁶

Slovenia's figure blends urgency levels. Slovenia keeps separate lists for "very fast", "fast" and "regular" referrals, and the reported number is a weighted average of all three. Genuinely urgent referrals are not placed on a waiting list at all.²

Denmark measures something slightly different. From 2020 the Danish figure runs from referral, which the OECD records as a deviation from its own definition, and it counts only active waiting. A patient who chooses to postpone surgery is excluded.² Denmark's 44 days covers a longer span than the definition asks for and is still the shortest in the table.

Italy's cataract figures are understated. The OECD notes Italian cataract data "are underestimated because this kind of surgical procedure is usually performed without a formal admission in hospital".²

Poland is improving quickly. Poland's census-measure median for hip replacement was 663 days in 2019, 343 days in 2024 and 282 days in 2025.¹ A reader who treats the 343-day figure as Poland's current position is roughly two years out of date.

One widely syndicated write-up shows how easily the two series blur together. A June 2026 Euronews article gave cataract figures of 81% for Norway and 13% for Poland waiting over three months.⁷

The current OECD database puts Norway at 86.1% for 2024 on the treated-patients measure, and at 81.3% for 2023.¹ Poland's 13% matches the treated-patients series, not the census series, which reads 31%.¹ The two countries' figures come from different years and different measures inside one table.

How to use these numbers

Ask which series produced any waiting figure you are quoted. A census of the list tells you about the backlog you would be joining. A treated-patients figure tells you how long people who actually had the operation waited.

For a decision about flying abroad, the first answers "how stuck is this queue". The second answers "how long until my turn". They are different questions.

Then add the part neither number contains. The wait to see the specialist sits outside both definitions, so the total time from first appointment to surgery is longer than any figure in the table.³

Check the year before acting on a ranking. The OECD database already carries 2025 figures that are absent from most coverage of the 2025 report, and Poland's fell by 61 days between the two.¹

Patients inside the EU also have a route that does not require paying privately. Under the social security coordination rules, a national health service can be obliged to authorise and pay for treatment in another member state.⁸ The test is whether it can treat the patient within a medically justifiable time.⁸

Poland's National Health Fund runs exactly this process. It applies to patients whose treatment "cannot be provided within the time necessary in your current state of health".⁹

Sweden sets its own domestic benchmark at 90 days from the decision to operate.¹⁰ A national guarantee like that is often a better test of whether your wait is abnormal than any league table.

Footnotes

1. https://sdmx.oecd.org/public/rest/data/OECD.ELS.HD,DSD_HEALTH_PROC@DF_WAITING,/all?startPeriod=2019&format=csvfilewithlabels — OECD, "Health Statistics: Waiting times" dataset (DSD_HEALTH_PROC@DF_WAITING), retrieved via the OECD SDMX API. Accessed Sep 20, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

2. https://webfs-els.oecd.org/files/Health-Statistics/HEALTH_PROC_Healthcare-Utilisation/8_Waiting-times-for-selected-elective-surgeries.pdf — OECD, "OECD Health Statistics 2026 — Definitions, Sources and Methods: Waiting times for selected elective surgeries". Accessed Sep 20, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

3. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/234105/1/PURE-Backlogs_Nov_2025.pdf — Luigi Siciliani, Gaetan Lafortune, Marie-Clémence Canaud and Chekwube Madichie, "Backlogs, waiting times and waiting lists of elective surgeries across OECD countries", Health Policy (published Oct 28, 2025), accepted version via White Rose Research Online. Accessed Sep 20, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

4. https://www.sanidad.gob.es/estadEstudios/estadisticas/inforRecopilaciones/docs/LISTAS_PUBLICACION_Dic_2025.pdf — Ministerio de Sanidad (Spain), "Sistema de Información sobre Listas de Espera en el Sistema Nacional de Salud: Situación a 31 de Diciembre de 2025". Accessed Sep 20, 2026. ↩

5. https://cakalnedobe.ezdrav.si/zdravstvena-storitev/588/redno?procedureName=endoproteza-kolka-delna-pep-totalna-tep — National Institute of Public Health of the Republic of Slovenia, "Čakalne dobe: Endoproteza kolka delna (PEP)/totalna (TEP)", national waiting-times portal. Accessed Sep 20, 2026. ↩ ↩²

6. https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/Nov25-RTT-SPN-Publication-PDF-458K-1Xmjkk.pdf — NHS England, "Statistical Press Notice: NHS referral to treatment (RTT) waiting times data, November 2025" (published Jan 15, 2026). Accessed Sep 20, 2026. ↩

7. https://www.euronews.com/health/2026/06/03/waiting-times-for-healthcare-in-europe-the-worst-countries-ranked — Euronews, "Waiting times for healthcare in Europe: The worst countries ranked" by Servet Yanatma (published Jun 3, 2026), reporting OECD Health at a Glance 2025 data. Accessed Sep 20, 2026. ↩

8. https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/health/planned-healthcare/right-to-treatment/index_en.htm — European Commission, "Your Europe: Planned medical treatment abroad — your rights". Accessed Sep 20, 2026. ↩ ↩²

9. https://www.nfz.gov.pl/dla-pacjenta/medical-treatment-abroad/planned-treatment-requiring-prior-authorisation-of-the-national-health-fund/too-long-waiting-times-for-treatment-in-poland/ — Narodowy Fundusz Zdrowia (Poland's National Health Fund), "Too long waiting times for treatment in Poland". Accessed Sep 20, 2026. ↩

10. https://extra.skr.se/vantetiderivarden/vantetidsstatistik/aktuelltvardgarantilage.46227.html — Sveriges Kommuner och Regioner (Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions), "Aktuellt vårdgarantiläge". Accessed Sep 20, 2026. ↩

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