Strategic input from the Project Advisory Board

‘Motivating large numbers of clinicians embarking on an ambitious project as BFCC sometimes raises suspicions: “Is Big Brother watching us? Or are far-off academics just harvesting our data for their own obscure purposes?”’ says Dr Colin Currie from the University of Edinburgh. ‘Such doubts may arise, but the reality is that the main purpose of audit is to provide clinicians with data that empowers them to look at the service they provide and make it better,’ explains the Scottish expert further. Dr Colin Currie is a member of the BFCC’s project advisory board (PAB) – a group composed by external experts who support the project consortium in the strategic development.

The PAB members are:

• PD Dr Laurent Audigé PHD (Schulthess Clinic, University Basel, Switzerland)
  Epidemiologist – Methodology & Statistics Manager AO Clinical
• Dr Colin Currie (University of Edinburgh, Scotland)
  Founder of the Scottish Hip Fracture Audit and member of UK National Hip Fracture Registry Steering Group
• Prof Dr Michael Krawczak (Kiel University, Germany)
  Chairman of the TMF – Technologie- und Methodenplattform für die vernetzte medizinische Forschung e.V.
• Prof Dr Karl-Göran Thorngren (Lund University Hospital, Sweden)
  Past President of the European Federation of National Associations of Orthopaedics and Traumatology (EFORT)

At its first meeting, the PAB discussed various conceptual and methodological topics such as potential risks influencing the success of the BFCC project. As the quality of the data is essential for the project outcome, one of the crucial topics to discuss was the question on how to involve clinicians and hospitals into the project. It was pointed out that it is of great importance to strengthen the motivation of clinicians and hospitals to provide patient data for the fracture registry. Furthermore, it is necessary to emphasize that a properly working registry would also be useful for the clinicians and hospitals to improve their work.
Altogether, the PAB meeting was a profound insight for the project consortium on how to improve the project’s strategic position in the Baltic Sea Region in order to strengthen the BFCC’s relevance to the health sector.