The AOA Board Meeting
Dr Kenneth Cutbush attended the Australian Orthopaedic Association Board Meeting in Melbourne, held at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, in his role as Scientific Secretary. Also pictured is Michael Johnson, AOA President.
The AOA sets training and professional standards for orthopaedic surgery in Australia and runs the National Joint Replacement Registry, which is the source of much of the implant survivorship data discussed elsewhere on this blog.
What the Australian Orthopaedic Association does
The AOA is the professional body for orthopaedic surgeons in Australia. It selects and trains orthopaedic registrars through the orthopaedic surgical education and training programme, which it runs in conjunction with the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. It sets the requirements for continuing professional development that surgeons must meet to remain in practice, and it organises the annual scientific meeting at which Australian orthopaedic research is presented. Its board is where those responsibilities are overseen.
The National Joint Replacement Registry
The Australian Orthopaedic Association National Joint Replacement Registry, usually shortened to AOANJRR, records joint replacement operations performed in Australia, including which implant was used, and then follows those joints over time to see which are revised and when. It has run since the late 1990s and covers close to all hip, knee and shoulder replacements performed in the country.
That is a rare thing for a country to have. A registry on that scale can detect that a particular implant design is being revised more often than its peers well before individual surgeons or hospitals would notice, because no single surgeon implants enough of any one design to see the pattern. It also supplies the denominator that clinical studies commonly lack, since it knows how many of each implant were put in rather than only how many came back with a problem. Individual results vary, and registry figures describe large populations rather than predicting the course for any one patient.
Why governance work matters
Training standards, examination requirements, registry governance and professional development policy are settled at board level, and between them they shape the standard of orthopaedic practice far more broadly than any one surgeon's operating list does. The work is administrative and largely invisible, which is exactly why it depends on practising surgeons being willing to take it on.
Affiliations: Australian Orthopaedic Association, St Andrew's War Memorial Hospital, QUASR (Queensland Unit for Advanced Shoulder Research), Queensland University of Technology and The University of Queensland.
Related information
See our post on the AOANJRR Annual Report, which draws on the registry the AOA maintains, and our research and publications pages.