For patients considering knee replacement, choosing a surgeon can feel surprisingly difficult.
Qualifications matter. Experience matters. Reputation matters.
But increasingly, patients can look at something else as well:
Outcomes.
Mr Sam Rajaratnam, Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at Cleveland Clinic London, has built his practice around that philosophy.
Cleveland Clinic London states that Mr Rajaratnam has performed more than 8,000 knee replacements and describes his National Joint Registry results as including one of the lowest revision rates and some of the strongest patient-reported outcomes for knee replacement. He has also performed more than 3,000 ACL reconstructions.
That emphasis on data is important.
A revision occurs when an existing joint replacement has to be surgically replaced or altered. Revision rates are therefore one of the measures used by the National Joint Registry when monitoring joint-replacement outcomes.
But they are not the only measure.
Patient Reported Outcome Measures — commonly known as PROMs — ask patients themselves about changes in areas such as pain, mobility and quality of life following their operation. The NJR combines patient-reported information with clinical outcomes to build a broader picture of the results patients experience after joint replacement.
Mr Rajaratnam has also been closely associated with rapid-recovery approaches to knee surgery and robotic-assisted knee replacement. Cleveland Clinic London says he was the first surgeon to implement ROSA robotic technology in the UK private sector.
For Arthur Health, highlighting surgeons who measure and publish their results reflects something fundamental about the way we think healthcare should work.
Patients should be able to ask:
How often does my surgeon perform this operation?
What are their outcomes?
How often do their patients require revision surgery?
How do patients describe their recovery?
The National Joint Registry now allows members of the public to look up recent joint-replacement activity for individual surgeons and hospitals, with its data refreshed annually.
Better information does not guarantee an individual outcome.
But it gives patients something extremely valuable when making an important decision:
confidence based on evidence.
