Hip fracture audit: Creating a 'critical mass of expertise and enthusiasm for hip fracture care'?

The care of frail older people admitted with hip fracture has improved greatly over the last half-century, largely as a result of combined medical care and surgical care and the rise - over the last four decades - of large-scale hip fracture audit. A series of European initiatives evolved. The first national hip fracture audit was the Swedish Rikshöft in the late 1980s, and the largest so far is the UK National Hip Fracture Database (NHFD), launched in 2007. An external evaluation of the NHFD demonstrated statistically significant increases in survival at up to 1 year associated with improved early care: with rising geriatrician involvement and falling delays to surgery, and from which lessons have been learned. Comparable national audits have emerged since in northern Europe and in Australia and New Zealand, and most recently in Spain and Japan. Like the NHFD, these use the synergy of agreed clinical standards and regular - ideally continuous - audit feedback that can prompt and monitor clinical and service developments, often demonstrating both rising quality and improved cost effectiveness. In addition, important benchmarking studies of hip fracture care have been reported from India and China, both of which face huge challenges in providing care of fragility fractures in populations characterised by first-generation mass ageing. The 'halo effect' of the impact of growing expertise in hip fracture care on the care of other fragility fractures is noteworthy and now relevant globally. Although many national audits have now published encouraging reports of progress, the details of context and process determinants of the initiation and development of effective hip fracture audit have received relatively little attention. To address this, an extended discussion section - based on the author's experience of participation in several substantial audits, variously supporting and observing many others, and from his numerous discussions with audit colleagues over the years - may be of value in offering practical advice on some obvious and less obvious practical issues that arise in the setting up of large-scale hip fracture audits in a variety of healthcare contexts.