The latest report from the RCVS Knowledge Canine Cruciate Registry has been released. The groundbreaking benchmarking report is now in its third year, and contains results from nearly 2000 cruciate surgery cases.
How the Canine Cruciate Registry works
The Canine Cruciate Registry is a free-to-use registry that takes data from vets and pet owners and gathers insights to help vets improve their treatment of cruciate disease. Vets who have owner permission to do so log the surgery in the register, triggering follow-up emails to the pet owner. Vets can see this information from the owner, so they can perform their own audits, and the anonymised data is added to the register for industry-wide trends, insights, and benchmarking.
Initiatives like this demonstrate the power of clinical audit to drive better care and to support the ongoing development of confident, well-informed veterinary professionals.
- Aidan McAlinden RCVS and EBVS European Specialist in Small Animal Surgery
This year's headline results
- Participants are up 25%, and procedures recorded up 40%, compared to last year
- 56.8% of pathways were registered to RCVS Advanced Practitioners.
- The majority of procedures performed were osteotomies, but the TPLO increased while the CCWO decreased in popularity.
- 84.3% of patients received regional anaesthesia, usually a femoral and sciatic block
- Over two-thirds were described as complete tears
- Prophylactic post-operative antibiotic use has decreased by 19.3% since 2021, but peri-operative antibiotics remain constant at 99.9%
When asked about the report, Aidan McAlinden, RCVS and EBVS®️ European Specialist in Small Animal Surgery and Academic and Content Director at Improve Veterinary Education said "It is fantastic to see the Canine Cruciate Registry Report having such a positive and far-reaching impact across our profession. The insights generated are clearly improving patient outcomes, supporting informed client decision-making and increasing clinician confidence, while also enabling meaningful benchmarking of outcomes and responsible antimicrobial use.
As a practising surgeon, this high-quality real-world data is invaluable, and it directly informs the content in our Small Animal Orthopaedic Surgery Certificate programmes. Initiatives like this demonstrate the power of clinical audit to drive better care and to support the ongoing development of confident, well-informed veterinary professionals. Congratulations once again to the team and contributors."
Find out more about the Canine Cruciate Registry
Whether you're a surgeon hoping to benchmark your own success as part of a clinical audit, or a general practitioner wanting to improve your communication with pet owners around cruciate surgeries before referral, the Canine Cruciate Registry is a superb resource. You can find out more about the CCR or read the full report here.
