Joint Replacements

(asked on 27th January 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many (a) knee and (b) hip replacements have been carried out on the NHS in each of the last five years; and if he will make a statement.


Answered by
Philip Dunne Portrait
Philip Dunne
This question was answered on 1st February 2017

Such information as is available is shown in the following table. Hospital episode statistics are published by NHS Digital and give a detailed breakdown of the number of individual episodes of care by procedure, including knee and hip replacements, and waiting times between decision to admit and admission.

The numbers of people on a waiting list to start consultant-led treatment at the end of each month are published by NHS England for high volume specialties, such as trauma and orthopaedics, but not for individual procedures. The numbers of people waiting for knee and hip replacements in each of the last five years is therefore not held centrally.

Number of finished consultant episodes1 (FCEs) with a main2 or secondary3 procedure where a knee replacement4 or hip replacement5 has taken place in a National Health Service hospital, and the associated median waiting times in days from decision to admit to admission for these procedures6, 2011-12 to 2015-16.

Number of FCEs

Average median waiting time in days from decision to admit to admission

Knee replacements

Hip replacements

Knee replacements

Hip replacements

2011-12

67,751

91,067

89

83

2012-13

66,296

91,073

83

77

2013-14

66,882

93,915

80

76

2014-15

68,936

94,305

78

75

2015-16

66,974

92,380

81

76

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), NHS Digital

Notes:

  1. An 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 knee replacements: O18, W40-W42, W52-W54, W58, Z76, Z77, and Z84.
  5. The following OPCS 4 codes were used to identify hip replacements: W37-W39, W46-W48 and W93-W95.
  6. Time waited statistics from HES are not the same as published referral to treatment (RTT) time waited statistics. HES provide counts and time waited for all patients between decision to admit and admission to hospital within a given period. Published RTT waiting statistics measure the time waited between referral and start of treatment.
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