Postcode lottery for hip fracture hospital care

The quality of NHS care provided to people with hip fracture varies around the country and some areas are underperforming, says data from the National Hip Fracture Audit for 2013.

Every year over 60,000 elderly people are admitted to wards in England because of a hip fracture, and about 5,000 die within 30 days.

In the best performing hospitals 2% of people die within a month, compared to 13% of people in the lowest-ranking hospitals, reveal the figures from the British Orthopaedic Association and the British Geriatrics Society.

Two of the poorest performers are Luton and Dunstable Hospital and Watford General.

More certainly needs to be done to ensure that all people across the UK receive the optimum quality of care but other research has found that having hip replacement surgery for arthritis has become safer in the last decade.

For example, figures released in September 2013 indicated that mortality rates in the first 90 days after surgery dropped from 0.6% in 2003 to 0.3% in 2011.