Congratulations
Congratulations to Dr Helen Ingoe, a former fellow of the clinic, on her civil partnership with her partner Jim, and on the naming ceremony for their twin sons, held at the same time.
Dr Ingoe was a capable surgeon and a prolific contributor to the research programme during her fellowship, and remains active in research. All our congratulations to the family.
Research during a fellowship year
A shoulder fellowship is mostly clinical: operating lists, clinics and teaching. Research runs alongside it, and most units expect their fellows to take at least one project from question to publication during the year. There is a practical reason for building it in rather than leaving it to those who are interested. A surgeon who has designed a study, collected the data and had the write-up pulled apart by reviewers reads other people's papers differently afterwards, and is harder to persuade by a confident claim with thin evidence behind it.
Fellows are also well placed to do the work. They are in clinic and theatre every day, they see where the current approach leaves a question unanswered, and they are at a point in their careers where they have the clinical knowledge to frame the question and the time to pursue it. Many of them, like Dr Ingoe, continue research after the fellowship ends.
Registry research and what it is for
Joint replacement registries record every replacement performed in a country, along with what was implanted and whether it later needed revising. That makes them a different kind of evidence from a single surgeon's series. A registry covers tens of thousands of operations by surgeons of varying volume across many hospitals, so it describes what happens in ordinary practice rather than in one unit's hands.
What registries are particularly good at is detecting a difference in revision rates that no individual surgeon would ever see, because the numbers each surgeon deals with are too small. That makes them useful for questions such as whether a particular implant, or a particular step in planning a case, is associated with a different rate of further surgery. They cannot establish cause on their own, and they do not capture how a patient feels about their shoulder, so they sit alongside clinical studies rather than replacing them. Individual results vary.
Related information
- Dr Ingoe is the first author of the registry study covered in our post on CT scanning and shoulder revision rates.
- Our post on farewelling Dr Helen Ingoe.
- The research page describes the unit's current work.
- The shoulder fellowship page explains the programme.