Find us on the National Joint Registry

How many partial knee replacements has your surgeon carried out? The National Joint Registry will tell you.

As funding for knee surgery on the NHS becomes ever tighter, the numbers of people choosing to see our knee consultants privately is increasing. In many ways, that puts the power with you. Rather than accepting the surgeon presented to you by the NHS, you can choose your specialist – and there’s plenty of data available to help you make the right decision.

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About the NJR

The National Joint Registry (NJR) was set up by the Department of Health and Welsh Government in 2002. It collects data on every hip, knee, ankle, elbow and shoulder replacement operation that takes place in England and Wales. The information it gathers helps us monitor the performance of joint replacement implants and the effectiveness of different types of surgery.

If you are considering knee surgery, the NJR can help you too by providing stats on the numbers of total and partial knee replacements each surgeon performs each year. Whilst your final decision may be based on more than this data alone, it certainly helps to have transparency about perhaps the most vital aspect when choosing a knee surgeon: experience.

    >  Discover more about the National Joint Registry

That’s because knee surgery is a repetitive skill. Generally speaking, the more you do, the better you get. There are exceptions, but as a rule of thumb, a knee surgeon performing dozens of knee replacements each year is likely to be a better choice than someone who does a handful.

So what does the NJR tell us about the knee specialists of Yorkshire Knee clinic?

The national average

First, it’s important to look at the overall picture. In the last available reporting year (to April 2017 at time of writing), the average number of total knee replacements per knee surgeon was 56. The average number of partial knee replacements was just 15. So, according to the average, your typical knee surgeon performs a partial knee replacement slightly more than once a month.

But that figure doesn’t quite give the whole story. The average is skewed by the top 30 or so knee surgeons in the country who perform many dozens of procedures every year. In fact, the single most commonly recorded number of partial knee replacements per surgeon, annually, was one.

    >  Discover more about total & partial knee replacements

Yorkshire Knee Clinic and the NJR

Yorkshire Knee Clinic comprises Prof. Nick London, Dave Duffy and Jim Newman. You can find our individual NJR data by clicking our names, but we thought it might be worthwhile to compare the YKC’s totals with the national average. To be clear, the national average is a per surgeon figure, whilst the YKC figure combines all three of our data-sets, but even if you were to divide the YKC totals by three to find a YKC average, you’ll see the result still vastly outstrips that national average.

The above figures are correct at time of writing, but please click on our names to find the latest data. Once the figures are updated for 2018, for example, all our individual knee surgeons will have partial knee replacement figures well in excess of 50 per year.

In fact, so few knee surgeons perform 50+ partial knee replacements each year that the surgeons of Yorkshire Knee Clinic now represent 10% of all those in England and Wales who do.

Ready to talk to us about your knee pain? Please call us now on 03453 052 579.

    >  Discover more about us and our knee surgeons
    >  Discover more about knee conditions & treatments