More than 77,000 Canadians undergo hip or knee replacement surgery every year, and two thirds of these procedures are performed on individuals 65 years of age or older. The quality of rehabilitation care received by these patients varies greatly, and not all patients have excellent outcomes. Based on the latest research evidence, Dr. Westby recently developed best practice recommendations that will help guide clinicians and optimize patient outcomes.
To translate these recommendations into ‘actionable’ and ‘measurable’ statements for clinicians, patients and decision makers, Dr. Westby’s post-doctoral project will develop and evaluate quality indicators for rehabilitation of joint replacements. Quality indicators are specific statements that can be used to measure quality of care and identify gaps in care.
The first phase of research will bring together clinicians, researchers and patients from all across Canada to develop a set of quality indicators for both hip and knee replacement rehabilitation. These will then be converted into a Quality Tool that can be used by health care providers to collect quality of care data. The next phase will evaluate the reliability of this tool in a health region that performs a high volume of joint replacement surgeries. Dr. Westby will interview physiotherapists who work with joint replacement patients in pre-operative, acute, and post-operative settings, to explore their views on using the tool and potential barriers to implementing it in clinical practice.
Using this novel tool to collect quality data in ‘real world’ clinical settings will allow us to measure and inform the quality of rehabilitation for older adults having joint replacement surgery.