More than 2000 patients last year were fitted with artificial hips shown to have high failure rates, exposing the patients to at least double the risk of having to undergo painful and costly repeat surgery.
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The latest figures on repeat joint surgery rates have been issued as a Senate committee prepares to issue a critical report this week in the wake of the scandal over protracted delays to the withdrawal of the failure-prone DePuy hip prostheses.
But despite records showing a total of 24 different brands of hip prostheses failing at twice the normal rate, a total of 2700 of these products were implanted in Australian patients last year.
More than half of the implants involved products that had been identified at least two years ago as problem-prone, the figures collected by the National Joint Replacement Registry show.
An expert regulatory group would ''urgently consider''the significance of the latest figures from the joint registry, a spokeswoman for the Therapeutic Goods Administration said.
The TGA has come under fire from surgeons and patient groups for the three years it took to act on the DePuy prostheses made by Johnson&Johnson Medical.
Johnson&Johnson withdrew the prostheses from the Australian market in late 2009 and has recently revealed it is dealing with 3500 claims and has so far paid out $21million to patients in Australia.
In August 2010, Johnson&Johnson issued a worldwide recall of 93,000 DePuy implants.
About 80,000 artificial hips and knees are surgically inserted in Australia every year and the DePuy episode has fuelled demands for more rigorous surveillance from consumers and insurers.
The metal-on-metal joints have also been linked to dramatically increased levels of cobalt and chrome leaching into tissue around the implants, which some claim is creating further problems.
The TGA has told the Senate committee it is considering the feasibility of investigating the cobalt issue and says, while one million metal-on-metal hips have been inserted worldwide, only four patients have been scientifically identified as having symptoms attributable to it.
Robert Lugton, a patient who had to undergo painful and disabling surgery for the revision of his DePuy hip has attacked the lack of public warnings. Mr Lugton, a retired company director, said his DePuy hip was inserted in January 2008, when there was already damning evidence available in Australia.
He has urged the Senate Community Affairs Committee to push for measures ''to change what has been for us a nightmare, into the safe and simple operation it should be''.
The Australian Orthopaedic Association has defended surgeons over the continued use of the products and blamed the TGA for lack of action.
The association's president, Graham Mercer, said the vast majority of surgeons would change products shown to be suspect. It was for the TGA to take regulatory action and ''it damn well should not'' take them so long to act, Dr Mercer said.
