"Professor" Derek McMinn is a British orthopaedic surgeon and inventor who practised in Birmingham, United Kingdom at the BMI Edgbaston Hospital. McMinn developed one of the successful modern metal-on-metal hip resurfacing and the instrumentation and surgical technique to implant it. Hip resurfacing is a bone-conserving, less invasive alternative to total hip replacement (THR) for young patients, markedly improves the health-related quality of life measures and currently makes up around a twentieth of all hip arthroplasty (artificial joint) procedures performed in the United Kingdom. McMinn is also the inventor of several other prostheses for the hip and knee. Derek McMinn is the author of Modern Hip Resurfacing (), published in 2009. Hip Resurfacing Birmingham Hip Resurfacing McMinn first began performing hip resurfacing procedures in 1991 using the McMinn Resurfacing, manufactured bu Corin. The rationale behind the procedure was that it would be a bone-conserving alternative to THR for patients with higher activity demands i.e. young patients with severe hip arthritis who are otherwise in good health. This would buy time until they reached an age at which they would be more suitable for a THR. THRs use small diameter metal-on-polyethylene bearings which have a high rate of dislocation and revision in this group of patients. Sir John Charnley originally developed the conventional THR in the 1950s, which proved to be one of the most successful operations in the world. In this procedure the 'ball' part of the hip joint (femoral head) and a portion of its neck are removed and the 'socket' part (acetabulum) is grated in preparation. These are replaced with an artificial ball and socket with a long stem in the thigh bone. This and other designs of THRs have since transformed the quality of life of millions of old patients with severe hip arthritis. Because these devices contained polyethylene as one of the rubbing surfaces, Charnley was justifiably very wary of using it in young patients. He warned against the use of a THR in any young patient unless there were other physical restraining factors which would stop her/him from getting back to high activity levels. True to his prediction when these THRs were used in young patients they failed early even in the best centres on the world, including Charnley's own centre at Wrightington Hospital in the UK. The Swedish Hip Register shows that in young patients, 19% of THRs failed 10 years after the operation and