Total Knee Replacement

So knee replacements are very commonly done in this country. We do about 70,000 knee replacements a year. So it's a common procedure but it's a big procedure. We need to understand the risks and the benefits of the operation. It's a good procedure for pain relief and we would necessarily only do the knee replacement when somebody comes in with pain, has tried the simpler options like physiotherapy, like painkillers, like change of lifestyle and that hasn't helped. The knee replacement itself takes about an hour and a half to do as a surgical procedure. But you will be going into the operating room before the operation. It takes about 20 minutes to half an hour for you to have an anesthetic. Now it can be a general anesthetic or it can be a regional anesthetic where they would numb your legs from hip downwards. That is a discussion that is usually taking place between you and the anesthetist and they will decide on the best way of anesthetizing you. After the operation you would go into the recovery and you spend about half an hour to 40 minutes there and then you would be taken away into the wards. The knee replacement is a big operation and there are certain things that can go wrong. The overall success rate of a knee replacement is about 90%. So there will be 9 out of 10 people who are happier with a knee replacement but there will be 1 in 10 chance of you not being happy. The usual risks of knee replacement are infection, you can get some blood clots, we do give you antibodies to counter the infection, we give you blood thinning agents to stop the blood clots from happening but they can still happen. You can get some numbness around the skin where we make a cut, you can sometimes get a bit of stiffness, you will need some physiotherapy after the operation. Knee replacement standard, knee replacement lasts usually between 15 and 20 years, after which they start getting loose and you may require a second procedure. The long term success rate of knee replacement again is about 90 to 95 percent. After the operation we expect you to get out of your bed in the next day. If you have lost a lot of blood during the operation you might need some blood transfusion. You may occasionally have a catheter after the operation if your blood gland is not working very well. We expect you to be able to start walking after 24 hours. It takes about two to three days to recover and we expect you to go home after three days. Occasionally it can be a bit longer. You will then have stitches that will come out in your GP surgery in two weeks and then we will see you back in our clinic in about six weeks to do some more x-rays. You will be under follow-up for a year following that and we usually discharge you after that stage.