Mr Syed Ahmed is a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon who specialises in hip surgery. In this Q&A he delves into the process of selecting the right surgeon for a hip replacement procedure, offering invaluable insights into what factors to consider.
He also provides an overview of minimally invasive hip replacement surgery and explains his personal approach to hip replacement surgery, providing a comprehensive understanding of the techniques that guide his practice.
Q1. How do you chose your hip replacement surgeon?
A. This is a very important question that many of the patients ask, and I think the crucial elements that you've got to consider in choosing your hip replacement surgeon, one, is how many hip replacements they do in a year and the National Joint Registry publishes data on how many hip replacements each surgeon does annually. As with anything, the more you do of something, the better you get. Secondly, you want to speak to them about their results with hip replacements, so what their early revision rate is and what their complication rate is. The next thing you want to inquire about, which is very difficult to assess, is the wider surgical team. So, the anaesthetist, the physiotherapist involved, the nursing staff and their practice manager who really keeps you in touch with seeing them in clinic and follow up appointments. All of these are really crucial to your overall experience going through a major procedure such as a hip replacement.
Q2. What is minimally invasive hip replacement surgery?
A. In minimally invasive hip replacement surgery, you do not disturb any of the muscles around the hip. You want to try and expose the hip joint by going between the muscle layers, expose the hip joint and perform the hip replacement surgery with less soft tissue damage. And this results in less pain postoperatively and allows you to be able to get up and walk straight after surgery. It really benefits you significantly in terms of postoperative pain, recovery, and going back to all normal activities as early as possible.
Q3. What is your approach to a hip replacement?
A. I use a minimally invasive posterior approach, and I've done over 2,000 hip replacements doing this. I don't disturb any of the muscles, so you preserve the gluteus medias maximus, preserving the piriformis tendon and slowly take a little flap at the back of the hip down in order to be able to expose the hip joint and facilitate the surgery. What this means is that following surgery my patients have less pain, you are able to get up and walk either on the day of surgery or the next day following surgery and go back to all normal activities fairly early on following your hip replacement. So, most of my patients go back to driving at about four weeks and back to work around six weeks.
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