Improving outcomes after hip fracture at a safety net hospital with a standardised hip fracture protocol.

Introduction: standardised protocols for the care of geriatric hip fractures demonstrate improved patient outcomes with decreased cost. The purpose of this study is to evaluate outcomes of a standardised hip fracture protocol at an urban safety-net hospital.

Methods: All trauma patients presenting to our urban safety-net hospital are included in a trauma database and inpatient outcomes recorded. A hip fracture protocol was introduced at our institution in 2015, which depended on admission to a monitored setting due to the absence of a geriatric co-management service. The database was queried to identify patients surgically treated for a geriatric hip fracture in the 3 years prior to protocol implementation (2012-2014) and patients treated in the 3 years following protocol implementation (2016-2018). Demographics, time to surgery, inpatient complications, and length of stay were compared between groups.

Results: A total of 633 patients treated operatively for isolated hip fractures were identified, 262 patients in the 2012-2014 pre-protocol cohort, and 371 patients in the 2016-2018 protocol cohort. Following implementation of a hip fracture protocol the number of patients admitted to a surgical service increased from 198 (76%) to 348 (94%, < 0.005) with the number of patients being admitted to a monitored setting increasing from 40 (15%) to 83 (22%, = 0.026). The time to surgery was reduced to 2.75 days ( = 0.054). The complication rate fell from 23% to 4% ( < 0.0005). Length of stay was significantly reduced from 13.2 days to 12 days ( = 0.045).

Conclusions: A hip fracture protocol including admission to a monitored setting can be effectively implemented at an urban safety-net hospital where geriatric co-management is not available. This resulted in a decrease in complications and length of stay. Additional interventions are required to decrease average time to surgery below 36 hours.