LAUSR

and the estimated cost to the health care system was $445 million in 2015– 16.2 Surgery within 48 hours of initial presentation to hospital is widely accepted as a clinically meaningful indicator of best practice care, and is supported by the Australian Hip Fracture Care Clinical Care Standard when there are no clinical contraindications.3 However, timely access to emergency orthopaedic hip fracture surgery is difficult in a country as large and geographically diverse as Australia; patients admitted to remote or regional hospitals that do not provide orthopaedic surgery must be transferred to larger regional centres.