Hip and knee replacement

King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is one of London’s largest and busiest teaching hospitals, serving a diverse community across south east London and beyond. Its orthopaedic team carries out hundreds of hip and knee replacements every year, a significant, life-changing operation that requires patients to understand exactly what’s coming, plan their recovery carefully, and navigate a series of appointments and decisions in the weeks before and after surgery.

Every patient on the KCH hip and knee replacement pathway used to receive a printed leaflet. It covered the key stages: the appointments, the operation itself, what to expect immediately afterwards, how to plan for recovery at home. It was thorough, clinical, and easy to put in a drawer and not look at again.

The KCH communications team had a cleaner solution in mind. A series of patient information films that could be emailed directly to patients before their surgery date, hosted on the KCH website and YouTube channel, and signposted throughout the correspondence patients receive along the pathway. Films that patients could watch at their own pace, at home, when they were actually thinking about their operation, not just once in a clinical setting under time pressure.

Beyond accessibility, there was a practical argument too. Going through a printed leaflet with a patient individually takes clinical staff time. Translating that leaflet into other languages costs money and creates multiple versions to maintain. A well-made film, hosted once and distributed digitally, solves both problems at the same time.

We built the scripts directly from the existing KCH printed leaflets, working with the clinical team to adapt the information for film rather than reinventing it. The structure became a series of chapters,  planning for your operation, what happens on the day, what to expect immediately after, recovery at home, giving patients the ability to navigate to the stage most relevant to them rather than working through a single linear document from start to finish.

Every script went through a rigorous sign-off process with KCH surgeons, physiotherapists and patients. Clinical accuracy wasn’t something we could approximate. It had to be exact, and that process took the time it needed to take.

We cast actors to cover the range of patients and scenarios we needed across two full shoot days, giving us the flexibility to show the different stages of the pathway clearly and to reflect the diversity of KCH’s patient community. One of those casting decisions turned out to be quietly fortuitous: Anthony, who plays the male patient, had recently had a hip replacement himself. That first-hand experience showed in the small details – the particular kind of uncertainty before an operation like this, the specific reassurance you’re looking for – things we couldn’t have scripted.

The result was two main films, with the content structured so that chapters could also stand alone for patients who needed to revisit a specific stage without watching everything again.

The films are hosted on the KCH website and YouTube channel. They’re emailed to patients ahead of their surgery date and signposted throughout the correspondence they receive from the hospital. By the time a patient arrives for their pre-operative assessment, they’ve already had the chance to watch, absorb and think about what’s coming – at home, in their own time, as many times as they need.

For KCH, the films reduce the one-to-one briefing time that printed leaflets required, remove the ongoing printing cost, and make the information far more straightforward to provide across languages – the same filmed content works as a foundation for additional language versions without the complexity and cost of reprinting and redistributing separate leaflets.

A 2025 quality improvement study from University Hospitals of Leicester, looking at exactly this challenge of digital versus printed patient information in an orthopaedic setting, found that only 62% of patients reported reading printed leaflets at all, while 76% preferred digital information. KCH’s approach is ahead of where the wider NHS is heading, and the films we made for them are built to last.