Outcome following hip fracture: post-discharge residence and long-term mortality

摘要

* To whom correspondence should be addressednSIR—Hip fracture is the commonest reason for admission to acute orthopaedic wards, with 86,000 fractures each year in the UK [1]. Awareness of this and of the risk of resulting death, disability and dependency make it a much feared injury among older people [2].nnThe frailty of the people who typically suffer from this injury contributes to the high resulting mortality, with figures varying between 5 and 24% at 3 months and between 24 and 29% at 1 year [3].nnMost UK studies have focused on 30-day, 120-day and 1-year mortality, and only a few have reported longer-term outcome. We set out to profile mortality in a 5-year follow-up study of a cohort of >1,000 patients admitted with hip fracture.nnLong-term dependency and institutional care placement explain much of the economic cost of this injury [4, 5]. Using the same cohort, we examined survival for those people who needed care home placement as a consequence of increased dependency following a hip fracture.