Helping patients to make informed decisions about joint replacement surgery

Disease - Knee pain, hip pain, joint replacement

Lead applicant - Professor J Mark Wilkinson

Organisation - University of Sheffield

Type of grant - Project Grant

Status of grant - Active

Amount of the original award - £244,693.80

Start date - 1 January 2016

Reference - 20894

Public Summary

What are the aims of this research?

In this project researchers will use the UK National Joint Registry dataset of 1.6 million surgical cases to develop and validate a personalised, web-based decision aid to help patients, considering joint replacement, make evidence-based choices about their treatment.

Why is this research important?

Each year in the UK around 160,000 patients undergo hip or knee replacement. Whilst patients are often engaged in the decision-making process, they are dependent on the advice of their clinicians on the risks and benefits of surgery itself and of the type of joint replacement used. Individual characteristics such as age, sex, underlying diagnosis, surgical technique, and type of joint replacement significantly affects the outcome of surgery and risk of complications. This research team hope that the development of a personal, online decision aid will empower patients to be active partners in the decision-making process, and improve both individual outcomes and the cost-effectiveness of joint replacement.

A personalised decision aid will be developed from data in the UK National Joint Registry and then its effectiveness assessed by validating its results against 10,000 hip and 10,000 knee replacement patients within the UK.

How will the findings benefit patients?

Patients who are faced with decisions about hip or knee replacement surgery need to be able to make informed choices about their treatment in the knowledge that they have a good understanding of the likely risks and benefits involved. The development of a tool to help these patients make educated decisions is both patient-centred and of immediate clinical applicability. The successful application of such a tool would also improve patient outcomes and increase the cost-efficiency of joint replacement surgery and post-operative surveillance for the health service.