Scottish Hip Fracture Audit
Reporting on 2024

About this release

The Scottish Hip Fracture Audit (SHFA) is one of the Scottish National Audit Programme (SNAP) audits and collects details of the care that people receive for hip fracture during a stay in hospital. The audit uses the 12 Scottish standards of care for hip fracture patients to measure how well hospital teams are performing and identifies areas for improvement. The information is passed on to clinical teams, every month, so that they can continually improve.

This report provides information about how well the standards of care were adhered to between January 2024 to December 2024. The report also contains details of the measures that the SHFA uses to highlight differences in care and outcomes, between Scottish hospitals, referred to as key performance indicators or KPIs.

View further details about the audit, standards of care and the SNAP governance process.

Main points

• The number of people aged 50 and over who suffer hip fractures continued to rise, in 2024, 8426 cases (8355 in 2023)
• The constraints of inpatient bed capacity continued to impact timely discharge from the Emergency Department (ED): the average time patients spent in the ED was 5 hours 36 minutes compared to 5 hours 10 minutes 2023 and less (30%) were admitted to a ward within the 4 hour target in 2024 (37% in 2023)
• The proportion of patients who were discharged from hospital within 30 days grew in 2024 to 64% (60% in 2023), the highest rate since the audit started collecting data on all hip fracture patients in 2017, suggesting that discharge processes were improving
• The standards of care which did not improve, or which saw further decline in 2024 Standard 2. ED big 6care bundle, Standard 3. inpatient bundle, Standard 4. nutrition bundle have been highlighted to individual health boards as part of the SNAP governance process. View further details of the Scottish standards of care from hip fracture patients.

A horizontal bar graph which shows the achievement of each of the 12 standards of care for hip fracture patients as a percentage. There are results available for 2017, 2021, 2023 and 2024. Further details are available in the main report.

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SHFA standards 2024

Background

People who suffer from a hip fracture are usually frail and elderly and at risk of complications from surgery and/or the injury. This can be associated with increased length of stay in hospital, admission to care homes, and mortality.

The Scottish Hip Fracture Audit reports on the care people receive for hip fracture during a stay in hospital. The Scottish Standards of Care for hip fracture patients are used to measure this care and the results support the collaborative work between the Scottish Government, PHS and Health Boards to continually drive improvements.

Since 2017 the audit results have been based on data collected about all hip fracture patients, prior to this a sample of patient care was used.

Data are collected by Local Audit Co-ordinators based in each hospital and submitted to PHS for analysis and report production.

Further information

The next release of this publication will be August 2026.