AB120. 28. A 12-month audit of length of stay for hip fractures admitted to a large trauma centre in Ireland

Background: In 2017, Cork University Hospital (CUH) admitted 467 hip fracture patients over the age of 60.

Methods: In 2017, CUH admitted 467 hip fracture patients over the age of 60. The national hip fracture database was queried to assess if admission day or month affected CUH patient length of stay (LOS)—including day of the week for admission and surgery. The search criterion was all discharges occurring between 01 January 2018 and 31 December 2018. The query returned 515 discharge records of all ages.

Results: The average LOS for all 515 records was 15.5 days. Once exclusion criteria were applied to the results, 395 records are left. The average LOS for these patients was 14.7 days. The LOS peaked in March at 18.2 days but overall trended downwards month-on-month after that bar small spikes in June and October. Patients that had their operation on a Wednesday had the longest average LOS of 16.5 days, whereas surgery on a Saturday had a LOS of 13 days—this discrepancy may be due to a lack of physiotherapy services over the weekend.

Conclusions: CUH saw a decrease in average LOS based on admission date from Q1 (16.9 days) to Q4 (12 days). This can be attributed to several initiatives including: centralising patients onto a dedicated trauma floor, establishing a ‘Hip Fracture Pathway’ that included a designated hip fracture.

Keywords: Hip fracture; hip fracture database; length of stay