Scaling Up Hip Fracture Care

The BOA is a partner organisation in two grants with the Health Foundation. These grants support two projects which are designed to spread best practice in Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery.


HIP QIP

Hip fracture is very common – almost 65,000 people were admitted into hospital with a fractured hip last year. It is also very serious: nearly a third of people who fracture their hip will die within the year and a fifth of patients won’t return to their own home. The cost of care is high and set to rise sharply as our population ages.

Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s hip fracture quality improvement programme (HIP QIP) has been established to address these challenges. The programme is run in partnership with the British Orthopaedic Association and Academic Health Science Network for the North East and Cumbria, with evaluation by the Royal College of Physicians.

This project involves replicating the learning from HIP QIP by supporting four other acute hospital trusts who are currently struggling to provide safe, high quality hip fracture care to patients. The sites have been selected based on poor outcomes in the National Hip Fracture Database annual report.

The project aims to help these sites to provide hip fracture care of the highest quality, ensure recent evidence and national standards are systematically implemented, and provide improved patient experience.

To see how the Trusts have been doing since the collaborative launched in Sept 2016 look here.

 

QIST Research

Building on the success of the Quality Improvement for Surgical Teams (QIST) initiative, we are pleased to introduce an ambitious new collaborative opportunity to work together to improve surgical outcomes through the preoperative treatment of mild anaemia and decolonisation of carriers of Methicillin Sensitive Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA).

This programme is led by Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, in partnership with the British Orthopaedic Association, NHS Improvement, York Trials Unit and industry.

The introduction of two interventions: preoperative anaemia and MSSA screening, aimed at reducing complications in hip and knee replacement, will be tested. The study will be conducted over 12 months, at the end of which each Trust will learn the other intervention to maximise their benefit of being involved.

These interventions have significantly reduced transfusion, critical care admission, length of stay, readmissions and MSSA prosthetic joint infections in the host organisation (Northumbria) and participating trusts are projected to save around £6.3M per annum once the interventions have been introduced. Both these interventions are recommended for hip and knee replacement in best practice guidelines.

The trial is now closed to recruitment and all participating Trusts are making excellent progress in developing and embedding these clinical pathways into routine practice, and collecting the data so we can assess for improvements.

The collaborative has recently been Highly Commended at the 2018 Health Service Journal (HSJ) Awards in the acute sector innovation category. An outstanding achievement for all involved.

We will be running a second round of collaborative improvement events from November 2019. If you are interested in joining please contact the project manager, Gill at: [email protected]

Further information can be found at www.qist.org.uk/#clinical-trials.

To register your interest in becoming a trial centre please contact the study lead Professor Mike Reed at: [email protected]. Further information can be found at www.qist.co.uk.