Your comments: 6 June 2018

I read with interest your article on hip surgery (Frontline 2 May 2018). 

 

In this, Professor Karen Barker is reported as saying that patients are ‘not prepared to put up with the levels of symptoms that patients in previous years would’. The implication is that patients are electing to have surgery in greater numbers and at an earlier age.

 

Perhaps we are missing the point. The question is why these patients are being offered hip replacement surgery in the first place. X-ray evidence of mild to moderate degenerative change is not a justification for offering hip replacement to the patient. The outcome is often unsatisfactory in terms of pain relief unless radiological changes are advanced. A sceptic would say that if one allows private hospitals driven by the profit motive access to taxpayers’ money, by providing operations to NHS patients, then inevitably decisions to offer them surgery of any form will trend upwards.

 

I own a cluster of private practices in north Kent, employ mainly physiotherapists but also a podiatrist, and our applications to the Care Quality Commission has been repeatedly refused. They say that we don’t meet their requirements. 

 

We have an independent prescriber (consultant physiotherapist) and injection therapists (advanced physiotherapists). But we don’t have a doctor or nurse and so, according to the Care Quality Commission, we do not meet its criteria for registration. 

 

We work within our scope and follow all legislation, but how many unregistered practices aren’t follow these things? As an NHS provider, I feel the Care Quality Commission should be monitoring us and other private physiotherapy practices. As a profession, we physiotherapists are leaving ourselves exposed by not being governed by the Care Quality Commission. Surely with the increasing scope of physiotherapy practice, the CSP should be putting pressure on the Care Quality Commission to update its registration policies.

 

I’m a physiotherapist working in Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, south Wales. 

 

I’ve recently rotated onto a similar falls project (see Frontline Falls: a better way?7 February 2018). 

 

We’ve been running for more than18 months and a business case is being put forward for permanent funding for this project.

 

It would be great to make contact with anyone involved in a similar project and to be able to share ideas. Could you drop me an email?