Registration of Total HIP Reoperations on Hospital and Country Level by Aid of Routine Surgery Statistics

Abstract

The total endoprosthesis operation of big joints has become a mass product of the hospitals during the last 10 years. In Finland about 2500 such operations per year are done. The patients are aged and have often other diseases. Ability to move is essential to them since daily living manageability at home is absolutely the best. Less pains produce a better standard of living whereas continuous languishing does not prohibit walking and sleeping. This is why the endoprosthesis operations are generally accepted as one of the most helpful procedures of aged people, although they are expensive and sometimes complicated, too. The problem is to join the living organism to a technological product. Despite 20 years of intensive development work, the prostheses tend to loosen and cause reoperations. The loosening happens years after the application, the frequency is about 0.5–1 % every year. Collecting a sufficient amount of patient loosenings to prove some prostheses weakness takes much time. That is why almost all studies concerning these operations are multicentric. How do we have this continuous follow-up multicentrically? In Finland we have a particular register for endoprostheses, it collects data immediately after the operation and a year later. In Sweden a reoperation register is in use in some parts of the country.