St James's Hospital, Dublin, Ireland
The Bone Health and osteoporosis unit was established in 2003. A key part of the service has been identifying fragility fractures through FLS, which has greatly expanded year on year to deliver integrated patient-centred care. With the advent of the Irish fracture liaison database audit it brought challenges providing DXA and reviewing patients in line with the International Osteoporosis Foundation’s “Capture the Fracture” initiative.
With the recent appointment of a full time candidate nurse practitioner dedicated to FLS., this will allow the service to expand by identifying and addressing rising fracture numbers and deliver significant benefits to patients who would otherwise be at risk of sustaining additional fragility fractures. A case finding approach is used to identify all new distal radius, pelvic, humerus and acute vertebral fractures presenting to the radiology department. Remaining fragility fractures are seen by the C.N.S.’s in the nurse led clinics.
It is equipped with two high resolution Hologic Horizon type A DXA scanners and, together with the department of Clinical Biochemistry in St James’s Hospital, it has access to the most up to date bone biochemistry and bone turnover markers and a modern tandem mass spectrometer for accurate measurement of serum vitamin D levels.
