Future registry research: database linkage in Trauma and Orthopaedics

Trauma and Orthopaedics has long been established as a leader in the collection and analysis of high-quality patient data for the purposes of quality improvement and research. The scale and scope of registry data across several patient groups and procedures are the envy of colleagues around the world. The ability to link these data to other routinely held clinical information (e.g. patient health records held within the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data warehouse) allows us to enrich these data with important information that is not present in the original database, and would otherwise be a substantial burden to collect for every patient.