Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

When old people fall they sometimes break their hip. They then go to hospital to get better. In Canada there have been lots of efforts to lower the amount of time people have to spend in hospital. We do not know if these efforts have made any change to the amount of time patients spend in hospital before or after their operation. This study helps to answer these questions. We looked at 169,595 hospital files of people older than 65 years of age, who went to hospital with after a broken hip between 2004 and 2012 in Canada. We were interested to see how long people stayed in hospital before having an operation to fix their hip, and how long people stayed in hospital after their operation. Over nine-years, people spent less and less time in hospital after breaking their hip. In fact 30 days after coming to hospital 10% less patients were still in hospital in 2012 compared to 2004. This change was mostly because people left hospital quicker after their operation. There was no change in how quickly people had an operation to fix their hip. Our results suggest that efforts to lower the amount of time people have to stay in hospital have worked. There was a big change in how long people stay in hospital after they break a hip from 2004 to 2012. People spend less time overall. In particular, trying to get people to the operating room earlier did not make much difference. However, changes in how long a patient needs to stay in hospital after their operation have helped to reduce hospital stays.