Background: hip fracture represents a huge medical, social and financial burden on patients, their carers and the health and social care systems. For survivors, return to their own home may be a key outcome. The Nottingham Hip Fracture Score (NHFS) is a validated score, based on admission characteristics, for predicting 30-day and 1-year mortality that may be of benefit in predicting return-to-home, directly from the acute orthopaedic ward.
Objective: to assess the utility of the NHFS as a predictor of return-to-home in patients following hip fracture.
Methods: the NHFS was calculated for all patients admitted from their own home and the correlation between the NHFS and eventual return-to-home was calculated, as well as the probability of discharge by within 7, 14 and 21 days.
Results: a total of 6,123 patients were available for analysis. Of which, 3,699 (60%) were discharged from acute hospital to their own home. Increasing NHFS was negatively correlated with eventual return-to-home (r(2) = 0.949) and with the proportion of patients discharged back to their own home at 7, 14 and 21 postoperative days, respectively (r(2) = 0.84, 0.94, 0.96, respectively).
Conclusions: the NHFS is a reliable tool for predicting return-to-home. It may be useful for discharge planning, and for the design of future research trials.