Putting Patients First:
Patient and Family Centered Care

Reducing Anxiety in the Treatment of Arthritis
and Total Joint Replacement Surgery

The Opportunity:
According to NIH Consensus Panels (1994, 2003) and independent studies, total-knee arthroplasty (TKA) and total-hip arthroplasty (THA) are underutilized. The 2003 NIH Consensus Panel estimated that only 12.7 percent of women and 8 percent of men who were candidates for the procedures took advantage of them. This underutilization is due in part to an unawareness of the benefits or fear of surgery and in part due to wide disparities across racial and ethnic groups, as well as by gender and geographic location. (U.S.) Underutilization is a significant issue that merits further investigation.

On The Practical Side

• The decade beginning in 2000 has been declared the “Bone and Joint Decade” (Delmas and Anderson, 2000)
• According to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, three million inpatient and 4.3 million outpatient orthopedic procedures were performed in U.S. hospitals in 1995
• Musculoskeletal disorders cost approximately $215 billion per year in healthcare costs and loss of economic productivity (Preaemer et al., 1999)
• Osteoarthritis accounts for a large proportion of musculoskeletal disorders and will increase in prevalence as the Baby Boomer generation ages, because incidence rises rapidly with age
• Osteoarthritis alone disables about 10% of Americans age 60+, as well as compromises the quality of life of more than twenty million, and costs the U.S. economy more than $60 billion per year (Buckwalter et al., 2004)
• According to the Center for Disease Control statistics (CDC, 2005a), in 2002, 43 million U.S. adults were diagnosed with some form of arthritis, and 23 million more reported chronic joint symptoms that had not yet been diagnosed
• Forty-seven percent of persons age 65+ and fifty-one percent of adults age 75+ reported an arthritis diagnosis in 2002
  
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