Knee Replacements

(asked on 11th November 2016) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many knee replacement operations were performed in NHS hospitals in each of the last five years.


Answered by
Philip Dunne Portrait
Philip Dunne
This question was answered on 21st November 2016

The information requested is available from Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), which give a detailed breakdown of individual episodes of care by procedure, including hip and knee replacements.

Finished Consultant Episodes1 (FCEs) with a Main2 or Secondary3 procedure where a hip replacement4 or knee replacement5 has taken place in a National Health Service hospital6, 2011-12 to 2015-167.

2011-12

2012-13

2013-14

2014-15

2015-16

Hip FCEs

91,067

91,073

93,915

94,305

92,380

Knee FCEs

67,751

66,296

66,882

68,936

66,974

Source: HES, NHS Digital

Notes:

  1. A FCE is a continuous period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one healthcare provider. FCEs are counted against the year in which they end. Figures do not represent the number of different patients, as a person may have more than one episode of care within the same stay in hospital or in different stays in the same year.
  2. The first recorded procedure or intervention in each episode, usually the most resource intensive procedure or intervention performed during the episode. It is appropriate to use main procedure when looking at admission details, (e.g. time waited), but a more complete count of episodes with a particular procedure is obtained by looking at the main and the secondary procedures.
  3. As well as the main procedure, there are up to 23 secondary procedure fields in HES that show secondary procedures performed on the patient during the episode of care.
  4. The following OPCS 4 codes were used to identify hip replacements: W37-W39, W46-W48 and W93-W95.
  5. The following OPCS 4 codes were used to identify knee replacements: W40-W42, W52-W54, W58, O18, Z66, 77, and 84.
  6. The data only includes NHS hospitals and does not include private patients treated in NHS hospitals, patients who were resident outside of England and care delivered by treatment centres (including those in the independent sector) funded by the NHS.
  7. 2015-16 data is provisional.

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