WHISH
Trial Status: Complete
Recruitment closed February 2018
What is the rate of deep infection after hip fracture surgery in patients with negative pressure wound therapy compared to standard care wound management?
BRIEF SUMMARY
Hip fractures affect 70 000 patients per year in the UK. Almost all patients undergo surgery to enable them to start walking again. However, between 2% and 7% of patients will get a wound infection. These infections are very serious and lead to a much longer hospital stay, more surgery and for half of the patients-death.
In surgery, the use of negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT)-a type of suction dressing-is increasing rapidly. However it has not been tested rigorously in a formal trial, and it has not been looked at for hip fracture surgery specifically.
This feasibility study aims to better understand the scale of the infection problem in hip fracture surgery, and to explore whether it will be feasible to run a large multicentre trial comparing NPWT with normal wound dressings.
Trial Publications
The study protocol publication can be found here.