Conclusion
With anaemia present in a significantly large proportion of the population presenting for lower limb joint replacement surgery, the results of this study signify a difference in length of hospital stay and transfusion rates between non-anaemic patients and anaemic patients. However, this study has shown that there is no statistical difference between transfusion rates of anaemic patients optimised pre-operatively and anaemic patients who were inadvertently not. Furthermore, the hospital length of stay is in fact longer in anaemic patients who received corrective treatment compared to the anaemic cohort group who did not.
It is important to consider the impact of anaemia as a contributing variable to the outcome as opposed to a stand-alone characteristic, particularly as there are limitations to this study. These include taking into consideration other relevant and important factors such as peri-operative blood loss, patients’ co-morbidities, anaesthetic techniques and transfusion thresholds for individual patients.
Nevertheless, although patients should ultimately be managed on an individual basis in contrast to treating their numbers, more research would be beneficial in ascertaining on how to best manage anaemic patients to improve and match their outcome to their non-anaemic counterparts, as well as be able to bring the cost down for the NHS.