Guidance
This guideline covers managing hip fracture in adults. It aims to improve care from the time people aged 18 and over are admitted to hospital through to when they return to the community. Recommendations emphasise the importance of early surgery and coordinating care through a multidisciplinary Hip Fracture Programme to help people recover faster and regain their mobility.
NICE has also produced a guideline on osteoporosis: assessing the risk of fragility fracture.
In January 2023, we reviewed the evidence and updated the recommendations on surgical procedures. For more information, see the update information.
Recommendations
This guideline includes recommendations on:
- imaging options in occult hip fracture
- timing of surgery
- pain relief
- anaesthesia and surgical procedures
- mobilisation strategies
- multidisciplinary management
- patient and carer information
Who is it for?
- Healthcare professionals
- Commissioners and providers
- Adults with hip fracture and their families and carers
Guideline development process
How we develop NICE guidelines
This guideline was previously called hip fracture: the management of hip fracture in adults.
Your responsibility
The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals and practitioners are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or the people using their service. It is not mandatory to apply the recommendations, and the guideline does not override the responsibility to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual, in consultation with them and their families and carers or guardian.
All problems (adverse events) related to a medicine or medical device used for treatment or in a procedure should be reported to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency using the Yellow Card Scheme.
Local commissioners and providers of healthcare have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual professionals and people using services wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with complying with those duties.
Commissioners and providers have a responsibility to promote an environmentally sustainable health and care system and should assess and reduce the environmental impact of implementing NICE recommendations wherever possible.