SYSTEMS OF ASSESSMENT WITHOUT SEPARATE FUNCTIONAL EVALUATION

The careful assessment of results is necessary to evaluate different methods of treatment and the need for operation. In hip surgery this is difficult because of the many factors involved: the indication for operation, the patient’s motivation, the actual operation to be done and the treatment thereafter, the period of observation and the selection of cases. Therefore it is important to have an objective and reliable method of assessment based on simple and well-defined criteria. It is the purpose of this paper to compare different methods of assessment on the same series of patients, in order to show the different results and to emphasise the importance of uniformity in publishing results. Some authors express only a personal opinion, without defining their criteria; others use tables giving grades to mark different results. Grades given to a patient before or after treatment are absolute values. They enable one to make comparisons between hips, an