Fast track in hip arthroplasty

[摘要] ‘Fast-track’ surgery was introduced more than 20 years ago by Professor Henrik Kehlet1 in abdominal surgery. It may be defined as a co-ordinated peri-operative approach aimed at reducing surgical stress and facilitating postoperative recovery.2 Fast-track surgery does not only focus on early discharge, but also on enhanced recovery of the patient leading to early discharge from hospital to the patient’s home. Since its development in the early 1990s, data on the results of fast-track surgery have been collected, but implementation of these findings in clinical orthopaedic practice has generally been slow, probably due to the diversity of hospital settings, inadequate staffing of wards, use of opioid-based analgesia regimes, insufficient post-operative mobilisation of patients, absence of well-defined discharge criteria and suboptimum preoperative patient information.

[学科分类] 神经科学

[关键词] total hip arthroplasty;‘fast-track’ surgery;morbidity