How does the National Joint Registry benefit patients?

We ask patients who are having a joint replacement to provide their consent for us to record information about their joint replacement operations on the registry. This is so that we can monitor the overall outcome results of surgery and protect patient safety. Currently over 96 per cent of patients agree to this and so we have around 3.7 million records.

The more records that we have on the registry, the more understanding we can gain through our monitoring and research work on how implants perform and how patient and surgical outcomes can be improved.

Through our work we bring direct benefits to patients by:

• helping patients find out more about the implants available to them.
• helping surgeons choose the best medical device implants for their patients.
• finding out how long the different brands of joint replacements last.
• helping to identify individual patients who have received an implant, should there are any subsequent concerns about the performance or safety of that implant.
• improving patient safety by looking at outcomes on how well implants, surgeons and hospitals perform and taking action where it is needed.
• empowering patients by providing a website with up-to-date information on hospitals and surgeons to enable them to share in the decision-making process. View here
• sharing information through the NJR website, including The Patient Decision Support Tool, enabling patients to understand the risks and benefits of surgery and be better equipped to share in evidence-based decision-making and choices on their treatment plans. View here

NJR data is also used to bring additional long-term benefits by:

• providing feedback to orthopaedic surgeons and teams to help to maintain high clinical standards that they can use in their annual appraisals in their hospital teams.
• promoting open publication in our annual report of the performance of implants.
• providing early feedback on any concerns about implant performance to regulatory authorities.
• providing feedback to suppliers on a regular basis about the performance of their implants to ensure they are informed on performance outcomes.
• monitoring and comparing the performance of hospitals and providing them with reports.