Scottish Arthroplasty Project
13 September 2022

About this release

This release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) presents data on the number of arthroplasty (joint replacement) operations in Scotland between 2001 and 2021 and on the frequency of complications such as infection or revision surgery following hip and knee replacements.

Main points

• The recovery from the pandemic on arthroplasty operations is improving. 8,529 first (primary) hip or knee replacements performed in Scotland in 2021 compared to 7,339 in 2020.

This chart show both primary hip and primary knee procedure from 2001 to 2021. Both follow a similar increasing trend from 2001 with a sharp decrease during 2020 which slowly increasing in 2021.

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Primary hip and knee arthroplasty procedures per year (2001-2021)

• Some Health Boards have been more successful than others when returning to pre-pandemic activity. For example: NHS Forth Valley performing 32% more procedures from 2019 to 2021. NHS Dumfries and Galloway performing 83% fewer procedures for the same period.
• The percentage of patients who died within 90 days of a knee replacement reduced from 0.3% in 2020 to 0.2% in 2021. Hip replacement also reduced from 0.5% in 2020 to 0.3% in 2021.

Background

The Scottish Arthroplasty Project remains one of the oldest arthroplasty registry organisations in the world. It is a member of the International Society of Arthroplasty Registries and, in comparison to many other countries are able to produce good quality data for a very modest outlay with the principal aim of providing quality assurance and adverse outcome monitoring of major joint replacement surgery in Scotland.

The Scottish Arthroplasty Project analyses hospital inpatient information to monitor the number of complications following hip and knee replacements in Scotland, and to ensure that surgeons performing these operations do not have a higher than expected complication rate. Where there is a higher than expected number of complications following operations performed by a particular surgeon, the surgeon is notified and asked to investigate the reasons for the increased rate in complications and to develop an action plan to reduce their recurrence.

Further information

Further information can be found on the Scottish Arthroplasty Project website (external website).

The next update of this publication will be in 12 September 2023.