$Pontefract Hospital$

Pontefract Hospital, part of Mid Yorks NHS Teaching Trust for which YKC’s Jim Newman is Clinical Service Unit Director, has just been awarded official Elective Orthopaedic Hub status by GIRFT (Getting it Right First Time). Here, Jim explains why that accolade matters to NHS and private patients.

If you can bear it, cast your mind back to the dark days of Covid. One of the many negative impacts of that period was on anyone waiting for knee surgery because, with resources understandably diverted, elective surgeries such as knee replacements were postponed again and again.

Today, years after the pandemic, orthopaedics still has waiting lists that are among the longest (if not the longest) in the NHS. For patients who are living with osteoarthritis, those delays can have a profound effect in terms of living with constant pain, the lack of mobility and the knock-on effects on mental health.

That’s why the Elective Orthopaedic Hub at Pontefract Hospital matters so much.

Bringing our elective work at Mid Yorks NHS Teaching Trust into a single site and becoming a centre of excellence has been a passion project of mine for many years. It helps lock in exceptional, evidence-led standards of care. And it helps protect and ringfence services when faced with competing priorities and external pressure (like Covid).

An official GIRFT hub

Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) is a national NHS England programme designed to improve the treatment and care of patients. The programme undertakes clinically-led reviews of specialties such as orthopaedics to examine how things are currently being done and how they could be improved.

GIRFT accreditation means that patients get exactly the same experience wherever they are treated. That is, they enjoy best practice in everything from pre-op to discharge, with a very skilled surgeon performing the operation to a very high level.

Becoming GIRFT accredited is a rigorous process. It scrutinises every part of the patient journey, from the multi-billion pound investment we’ve made in clean-air theatres to help reduce the risk of infection, to investment in consultants and staffing, to meeting pages and pages of criteria that include everything from day case rates for joint replacements to enhanced recovery protocols. It took a brilliant multidisciplinary team working together to deliver success, and I’m enormously proud of the collective achievement.

Enhancing the private sector

GIRFT status at the Pontefract hub is excellent news for the orthopaedic patients of Yorkshire. But you might reasonably wonder why, aside from my own personal involvement, it’s featuring on the pages of Yorkshire Knee Clinic, a centre of excellence for private knee surgery.

The simple answer is that good practice spreads, not just across the NHS, but into private practice too. The consultants, anaesthetists and others who work in the NHS can’t help but bring their GIRFT-honed processes into their private practice. And that means patients can feel confident that they are receiving the highest standard of care, wherever they choose to have their knee surgery.

Are you suffering from knee osteoarthritis? Please contact us, or phone us on 03453 052 579.

> Find out more about Jim Newman
> Discover more about osteoarthritis, symptoms & treatments
> Discover more about partial or total knee replacements