Discussion
The results of our survey provide a preliminary overview of SFFPS from 34 countries over six continents. Our results highlight the important supports that SFFPS are providing for patients with fragility fracture to ensure that patients have access to the best possible interventions to prevent a future fragility fracture. The majority of services are connecting with patients with fragility at the time of their fracture in the hospital, are including all fracture types, are operating 5 days/week or more and using local, national or international guidelines to structure their services. In addition, the majority of services conduct one-on-one in-person assessments, create care plans in collaboration with patients and/or family, start or recommend medications to prevent future fragility fractures and undertake follow-up to ensure treatment persistence. Despite these positive findings, our team identified some key areas for improvement of SFFPS.
Our results suggest the need to support expanding the reach of SFFPS to include more patients with fragility fracture as 25% of SFFPS reported that they were limiting their reach to patients with hip fracture only due to resource allocation and therefore are not adequately addressing the existing osteoporosis care gap.8–10 There is good epidemiological evidence that fragility fractures of the wrist, pelvis, spine and humerus often lead to hip fractures later in life.6 These SFFPS are missing an opportunity to prevent hip fractures in the future by treating all patients with fragility fracture.
A systematic review of the different models of secondary fracture prevention by Ganda et al highlights that models with a dedicated coordinator and systematic case finding lead to better patient outcomes than less intense models.19 SFFPS based in medical specialists’ office were reported by 20.6% of respondents, suggesting that there was no systematic identification of patients with fragility fracture when they initially presented for acute fracture care (commonly at a hospital or urgent care centre). Almost 25% of SFFPS were operating ‘as required’ which suggested that no dedicated personnel were assigned to case finding. In addition, over half of the services had no job description for a coordinator and only 27.5% of services had a coordinator who was dedicated to the role, with another 20% where the SFFPS was only part of their role. The results of our survey suggest that there is still much progress to be made towards optimal SFFPS for patients.
In our survey, we found that very few SFFPS had mandatory training in any of the key areas that we believe are needed for a high-functioning SFFPS: comprehensive management strategies for refracture prevention, bone mineral density (dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry) interpretation, fall prevention management, behaviour change methods and quality improvement methods. In addition, even when comprehensive training programmes are freely available through the UK Royal Osteoporosis Society training,20 the majority of respondents (60.6%) reported that training was unavailable to them. We hypothesise that this finding may be related to language barriers, as the UK training is only available in English, or to simply a lack of awareness.
Our findings are aligned with the results of a 2020 systematic review around the role of coordinators in SFFPS which found that only six of the 65 (9%) included studies reported having a specific education programme for coordinators.21 The systematic review concluded that there is a need to clearly define the role and scope of the coordinator in addition to developing accredited education programmes. Similarly, a systematic review of integrated osteoporosis care initiatives found that only 14 of the 69 (20%) included studies reported a training programme for healthcare workers with only five of the 69 (7%) included studies reporting multidisciplinary training.22
Our results suggest the need to develop core educational competencies for SFFPS coordinators and the multidisciplinary teams that are freely available in local languages, adapted to local healthcare contexts and well publicised so health providers are aware of them. The European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology (EULAR) recently published a research and education agenda that could serve as a guide for such educational competencies in our future planning.23 EULAR identified core competencies which they recommend to be incorporated in education and training to optimise SFFPS: (1) how to use (multicomponent) screening tools to understand fracture risk; (2) how to deliver and what to include in a fall prevention programme; (3) how to tailor education for patients with fracture with varying risks of falls; (4) the scope and role of non-physician health providers in FLS care; (5) how to support and promote medication adherence; (6) how to effectively promote bone health; and (7) medication side effects that impact on bone health.
Although the majority of SFFPS used a data system to record assessments and interventions, less than 50% used a data system to record patient outcomes and less than 40% are reporting KPIs or quality indicators to their healthcare organisations. Of those SFFPS collecting KPIs, only 15% knew how these indicators were used to improve the quality of care of their service. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement highlights the importance of collecting data to measure how a service is operating and using the data to continuously improve the care being provided.24 25 The results of our survey identified the need to support SFFPS to collect quality metrics and to identify clear pathways within their organisations to share the metrics and use them to improve their SFFPS. A recommended framework of KPIs for SFFPS has been developed by the National Osteoporosis Foundation, IOF and FFN to guide practice and to be inclusive of different SFFPS stage of development and access to healthcare resources.26
The majority of SFFPS that responded to our survey reported developing care plans in collaboration with the patient or their family member (62.5%). However, very few (9%) reported the use of validated PROMs. Many publications have reported the value of using PROMs for assessing service outcomes, in addition to individual patient assessment and follow-up of outcomes. Speerin and colleagues described how value-based care includes efforts to improve patient outcomes and their experience through better patient engagement with respect to clinical decision-making.27 28 The Integrated People-Centered Health Services (IPCHS) strategy developed by the WHO validates the need to incorporate a range of strategies that will help empower individuals to make effective decisions and take action about their own health.28 29 These strategies include using behaviour change theoretical models and shared decision-making.30 31 PROMs can be an important resource to help inform shared decision-making, empower the patient voice and to provide valuable information around adherence and persistence to treatment recommendations.32 A recent systematic review of the evidence on how SFFPS meet the elements of the IPCHS has confirmed that there is a significant need to support teams internationally to incorporate strategies such as PROMs in their SFFPS development.22 In 2016, the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care commissioned a literature review that concluded health services should be encouraged to use PROMs as a standard element of clinical practice.33 With the increasing awareness of the importance of patient input into healthcare planning, SFFPS are largely missing the opportunity to incorporate the patient voice to improve their service.34 35
A very small number of survey respondents answered the open-ended questions around facilitators and barriers and therefore our interpretation is limited. The support of colleagues, teamwork/staff engagement and administrative support were the most commonly reported facilitators. The most commonly reported barriers were funding, lack of staff, technology and database issues and a lack of interest by health providers and patients. Our results are consistent with a scoping review that found implementing new health programmes was enabled in scenarios when: (1) there is dedicated funding, (2) there are pre-existing relationships and networks to build on, (3) there are clear and agreed-on goals, roles and expectations, (4) there is strong leadership commitment, skill and experience and (5) decision maker partnerships are established early in the process.36 Our results also align with previous research that identified having an expert physician lead, decision maker support and addressing concerns around added workload for health providers were important facilitators for implementing and sustaining FLS programmes.37 A more recent study also aligns with our work by identifying the importance of demonstrating value for stakeholders and providing adequate resources for implementation.38 Our survey results highlighted barriers related to lack of technology and databases to support SFFPS and the importance of addressing both health provider and patient awareness around the need for secondary fracture prevention.
Limitations
Our study has several limitations. First, the response rate to our survey was low at 6% and there was a steady drop-off in responses to questions, which may have been due to the length of the survey. Our results may not be representative of all SFFPS worldwide. Second, almost a third (31.2%) of our respondents were from Europe and the majority of respondents (63.7%) were physicians; this bias is representative of the membership of FFN, which has a majority of physicians and a large membership from Europe where the FFN first started. Third, the survey was only available in English, possibly limiting participation from respondents whose first language is not English and could have contributed to misinterpretation of both questions and possible responses. Fourth, terminology is not consistently used across different countries (even within English-speaking countries) for describing key aspects of their services, possibly creating confusion around how to answer some of the questions. Finally, this survey may not reflect changes in practice brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the shift to telemedicine over traditional face-to-face interactions.39