Objectives: To evaluate the effect of an inpatient geriatric consultation team (IGCT) on end points of interest in people with hip fracture: length of stay, functional status, mortality, new nursing home admission, and hospital readmission.
Design: Controlled trial based on assignment by convenience.
Setting: Trauma ward in a university hospital.
Participants: One hundred seventy-one people with hip fracture aged 65 and older.
Intervention: Participants were assigned to a multidisciplinary geriatric intervention (n=94) or usual care (n=77) during hospitalization after hip fracture.
Measurements: End points were functional status, length of stay, mortality, new nursing home admission, and hospital readmission 6 weeks, 4 months, and 12 months after surgery.
Results: Mean length of stay was 11.1 ± 5.1 days in the intervention group and 12.4 ± 8.5 days in the control groups (P=.24). Complete adherence to IGCT recommendations was 56.8%. A significant benefit of intervention on functional status in univariate analyses (P=.02) 8 days after surgery disappeared in a linear mixed model. Participants with dementia had better functional status in a linear mixed model than those without (P=.03), but this effect was no longer significant after Bonferroni correction for multiple testing. After 6 weeks, 4 months, and 12 months, no between-group differences could be documented for mortality, new nursing home admission, or readmission rate.
Conclusion: This trial could not document functional benefits of an IGCT intervention in people with hip fracture. More research is needed to investigate whether a more-intensive approach with more-direct control over patient management, more-specific recommendations, and more-intense education would be effective.
© 2011, Copyright the Authors. Journal compilation © 2011, The American Geriatrics Society.