Participating Hospitals and Patients
knee arthroplasty, osteoarthritis, THA
OSTEOARTHRITIS, RECRUITMENT
The clusters were defined as participating hospitals and were eligible if they had performed more than 250 hip or knee arthroplasty procedures the year prior to recruitment and agreed to follow the trial protocol. The trial protocol was applied to all patients undergoing any hip or knee arthroplasty procedure at participating hospitals during the course of the trial. Hospitals were advised to give all patients (enrolled or not) the study drug, except if they were not eligible to receive the study drug (eg, patients using preoperative DOACs, warfarin, or dual antiplatelet therapy or patients with a medical contraindication to either drug). Whether patients received their allocated treatment was assessed by the inpatient audit (which included enrolled and nonenrolled patients). This recorded whether patients received the correct drug dose, given daily, and commencing within 24 hours of surgery and were provided a discharge prescription.The primary analysis included patients undergoing THA or TKA for a diagnosis of osteoarthritis only, who were eligible to receive the study drug.