ODEP provides hospitals with an objective, independent view on the quality and longevity of performance and safety data available for the orthopaedic implants that it buys and uses with their patient or are considering for use in future patients.

Clinical, management and procurement teams are encouraged to familiarise themselves with the ODEP rating of the implants in use within the hospital, and to assure themselves that implants both have and maintain an ODEP rating over time. The loss of an implant’s ODEP rating should result in a local review to consider the suitability of the implant for future patients. 

Hospitals contributing data to the National Joint Registry (NJR) can assess the ODEP rating of implants they use through the NJR Feedback systems and NJR Annual Clinical Report.  Hospitals not contributing data to the NJR are able to obtain an analysis of ODEP Rating for implants used by contacting us using Contact Us.  

There are some important points regarding how the use of ODEP-rated implants is assessed and reported at hospital level:  

• The ratings reported are those for the implant at the time of the surgery
• Pre-Entry is not an ODEP benchmark, it is simply an indication that the product has been registered with ODEP
• Pre-Entry A* is a benchmark which indicates that the product has been rigorously assessed and is being monitored in Beyond Compliance (but this does not imply that satisfactory outcomes are yet available)
• An implant will lose its ODEP rating when its progress through the ODEP ratings has lapsed, it has been withdrawn by the manufacturer, or where the data submitted is unacceptable.