Hip Surgery Q&A: Mr Andrew Skyrme

Hello. My name's Andrew Skyrme. I'm one of the orthopaedic surgeons here at The Horder Centre specialising in hip and knee replacement surgery. The important thing to think about with hip surgery is to start thinking before the operation. So your surgeon and yourself should sit down and chat about what the expected recovery is likely to be like. It's different for every patient. So I tell patients that it is an operation, they're going be in hospital for two or three days and generally I'd say the recovery is approximately six weeks. With that however, some patients who are very fit may get back to relatively normal activity in two to three weeks. Some patients may take twelve weeks. Again, depends a little on age, weight, fitness. We, at The Horder Centre, give you a very useful booklet that tells you all about the operation. It goes to all the things to expect in terms of pain, immobility. For the most part, however, it's a reasonably straightforward recovery. After the operation, It is a reasonably major operation, so you need to think about resting, trying to put work to one side, I would suggest you put work to side for about six weeks. If your work is clerically based, you could get back to doing some computer work from about week three. If it's physically based, then I would probably suggest six weeks off work. For sporting activities, I would suggest six weeks plus. One of the worries that patients have is the type of anaesthetic and patients are very a lot of patients are very worried about spinal anaesthetic, the thought of a needle going into their spine. My job is to reassure you this is a very safe procedure, and we use it as one of the mainstays of anaesthetic. It's very low risk. The risk is something like one in twenty thousand of complications. It's a great form of anaesthetic. It's done very quickly. Anaesthetists that work here at The Horder Centre are experts in this. They've done many thousands. At the same time, we use a combination of general anaesthetic, and and injection therapy. And my advice is listen to your anaesthetist. They're all very good and they will guide you through that process. And don't be worried about a spinal. I've had one myself when I had knee surgery, and it was relatively pain free. The second misconception is regarding the risk of dislocation with hip replacements. A lot of patients are worried that they will dislocate it after the operation. My advice is that dislocations are extremely rare. The national average is probably one in a hundred or one in two hundred. Here at The Horder Centre where the hip surgeons do hundreds and hundreds and thousands of these replacements, the risk with myself is probably one in five hundred. There is still risk, but I wouldn't make this a major worry for your operation. The other main complaint that patients worry about or worry that they have is about leg lengths being incorrect at the end of the operation, which is what we'd call leg length discrepancy. If I looked nationally at every hip replacement, I would suggest that one in ten patients have a leg length discrepancy at the end. Here at the Hoarder Centre, where the surgeons are very high volume and do hundreds to thousands of these, that risk comes down. And so I would suggest that once a year, I have a patient that will be unhappy with leg length, and so that's probably about one in four hundred, and I'm confident that that's the same with my colleagues. So I don't think it's something you would need to worry about significantly, And the surgeons here, all of them, will be thinking about leg length and have various techniques during the operation to reduce the risk, of that discrepancy.