Australian orthopaedic surgeon Dr Daevyd Rodda performs more than 800 joint replacements each year and says, “When you’re working with those sorts of volumes, it really makes you reflect on your systems and on how you can improve the patient experience.”
Rodda has worked in many excellent hospitals throughout his career, but says, “One thing that I could never kind of control was the patient experience in hospital.”
Patients typically have to fit into the hospital’s inflexible systems, but Rodda “…really wanted a bespoke patient experience, and that’s what got me interested in the concept of hospitals.”
Over more than a decade, that reflection has produced a specific patient-centred model of orthopaedic care:
- a high-volume joint replacement practice
- a smaller, purpose-built hospital
- an insurer partnership offering a no-gap program
- a technology platform to measure patient experience.
Rodda has deliberately considered and addressed each stage of the patient journey before, during and after surgery.
Mapping the whole journey
For Rodda, patient-centred care is both a high-level value and a detailed design brief, tested against every point where a patient might feel confused or anxious or where the environment might undermine their wellbeing.
One of the recurring issues Rodda noticed throughout his career was fragmentation.
“Patients get really frustrated with disjointed care,” he observes.
A joint replacement patient may engage with surgeons, nurses, allied health professionals, hospital operators and perioperative teams. Each may deliver high-quality care, but it can feel disconnected when the patient ultimately experiences the system as a whole.
“All these different stakeholders, they really have to be on the same page to deliver the optimal outcome for the patient.” That’s why he believes that,
“The future of healthcare is integration.”
Joint school
Rodda and his team identified patient preparation as a weak point in the traditional journey. “We saw that patients would see a surgeon and then turn up to surgery and not necessarily feel prepared or feel empowered that they knew what was going on,” he says.
Joint school addresses that. It’s a dedicated education session built into the pre-surgery pathway covering practical details that help patients feel more prepared and less anxious, such as:
- Home set-up
- Nutrition
- Managing dressings
- Who to call if something feels wrong.
Rodda tells his patients, “There’s a lot of homework to do, but ultimately you only get one chance to get this surgery right for you.”
Redesigning the hospital experience: Maroochy Private Hospital
After years of reflection, Rodda was drawn to a smaller hospital model that would offer fewer procedure types, done at high volume, with dedicated teams built around them. The approach mirrors overseas trends, where procedures like joint replacements are shifting from general hospitals into focused facilities. “They just do a few things, but they do them exceptionally well,” he says.
The result is Maroochy Private Hospital, which opened in June 2026.
Spearheaded by Rodda, it focuses on excellence in orthopaedics, neurosurgery, ophthalmology, and plastic and maxillofacial surgery.
Patient experience was one of the three priorities Rodda set for the hospital’s design, alongside clinical outcomes and staff culture.
“We wanted to have a real wellness mindset,” Rodda says. “We’re not focused on sickness.”
The ward sits on the building’s top floor, with a carefully selected colour palette, silent nurse call bells, and private rooms arranged around the perimeter to capture views of the beautiful Sunshine Coast. The hospital has also partnered with a local restaurant to give patients access to restaurant-style meals.
After joint replacement surgery, Rodda encourages patients to ditch the hospital gown because “They associate that with sickness.“ Instead, “I put them in a T-shirt and shorts, which I jokingly refer to as their exercise gear.” That’s a message of recovery.
Some years ago, aware that he “can’t function in the morning without a coffee,” Rodda began taking his patients’ coffee orders before their surgery. The morning after their procedure, a barista-style coffee would arrive.
Rodda remains surprised at the impact of such a small gesture. Some patients would mention the coffee weeks later at a follow-up appointment; others would bring him one. “It’s funny, but it’s often the smallest things that make the biggest difference,” he says.
After discharge
Rodda identified another vulnerable point in the journey shortly after patients returned home.
“Around day one or two after discharge, patients would feel a little bit lost. They might have an issue where they got a little bit of pain or something happened and they didn’t know what to do. And that anxiety, in my opinion, is one of the worst things for a patient experience.”
His response was to add nurse practitioner follow-up into the postoperative pathway.
The nurse contacts patients soon after discharge to check how they are going, ensure medications are in place and catch the small problems that might otherwise create unnecessary distress. The goal is to “Make sure that all those little things that are incredibly important for the patient experience are looked after.”
Measuring patient experience
None of this is treated as a soft add-on. Rodda uses patient-reported outcome measures to track whether the experience and the clinical results are genuinely improving, rather than relying on informal impressions.
“It’s not enough to just say, ‘my patients are happy’ or ‘my patients do well.’ We need to support that with objective data,” he says.
The Panacea AI platform is built around the patient journey to measure the experience without replacing the clinical relationship. “Healthcare is a people business,” Rodda observes. “But to string that experience together, it’s really important to have amazing tech solutions to help you.”
Widening access
For Rodda, affordability is a key aspect of patient experience. Despite traditionally “antagonistic” relationships between surgeons and private health insurers, Rodda has brokered a no-gap joint replacement program, which significantly reduces out-of-pocket costs for eligible patients.
The model has since expanded across insurer relationships. Patients now travel from across regional Queensland, Brisbane and occasionally even from interstate to access this affordable care.
Staff experience links to patient experience
Rodda knows that “You cannot deliver excellent clinical outcomes and an excellent patient experience without a highly motivated, highly skilled and happy team.”
That’s why staff culture was a key priority for Maroochy Private Hospital’s design, which features a rooftop staff area. Rodda describes arriving before a 6 am operating list and seeing staff drinking coffee together while watching the sunrise.
“That connectedness between the staff, I think, is so important,” he reflects, noting that it can be harder to create that kind of culture in a larger hospital environment.
The commercial case for patient-centred care
Building the infrastructure for patient-centred wraparound care isn’t cheap, and Rodda doesn’t pretend otherwise. But he argues, “If you look after the patient, and you put their needs first, the commercial aspects will look after themselves. That’s what we’ve found time and time again.”
Getting there has meant working outside a purely clinical role. “You have to step back a little bit from your clinical role and focus on stakeholder engagement,” he says. “If I could say that I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s being able to understand healthcare from different perspectives.”
He sees his ambitions for his own practice and for the wider system as one project rather than two. “We need to be innovative. We need to be smarter in the way we deliver healthcare from a system perspective,” he says. But the starting point, he adds, stays fixed: “Everything we do has to be focused on optimising patient outcomes.”
It’s a model built one deliberate decision at a time, from ward orientation to follow-up calls to coffee orders, and Rodda is clear about how he wants it judged. “First and foremost, I’d like to be known as a surgeon who puts my patients at the centre of everything I do.”
