Is After-Hours Orthopaedic Surgery Associated with Adverse Outcomes?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Treatment of fractures is sometimes performed after normal daytime operating hours and in such instances may be performed under less than ideal conditions. The consequence of performing operations under such conditions is largely unknown and was therefore studied in the context of intramedullary nail fixation of tibial and femoral shaft fractures. METHODS: Two hundred and three consecutive patients with either a femoral or tibial shaft fracture (Orthopaedic Trauma Association classification 32 or 42) treated with intramedullary nail fixation were included in a prospective, multicenter, nonrandomized study. Patients were divided into an after-hours group defined as an operation beginning from 4:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. or a daytime group defined as an operation beginning from 6:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. These groups were further divided on the basis of the injured bone into the following subgroups: after-hours femoral fracture (fifty-five patients), daytime femoral fracture (forty-four patients), after-hours tibial fracture (forty-eight patients), and daytime tibial fracture (fifty-six patients). The demographic and fracture characteristics were similar among the subgroups. All patients were treated with the same type of femoral antegrade, femoral retrograde, or tibial nail fixation with reaming. Data for fracture-healing, complications, operative time, and fluoroscopy time were collected prospectively. RESULTS: The healing rates were similar between daytime and after-hours surgery groups for both the tibial and femoral nailing. On the basis of univariate analysis, operative times were shorter in the after-hours group compared with the daytime group for both the tibial and femoral nail fixation groups (p < 0.02), but regression analysis failed to identify time of surgery as an independent variable associated with operative time. Radiation exposure was similar for the after-hours group and the daytime group for both tibial and femoral nail fixation (p > 0.05). The after-hours group had more unplanned reoperations than the daytime group (p < 0.02). Removal of painful hardware was more frequent in the after-hours femoral fracture group (27%) than in the daytime femoral fracture group (3%) (p < 0.02), and after-hours surgery was an independent variable associated with the need for removal of painful femoral fracture hardware (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Rates of nonunion, infectious complications, and radiation exposure are similar for after-hours and daytime surgery for intramedullary nail fixation of both femoral and tibial fractures. After-hours femoral nail fixation was associated with an increased frequency for removal of painful hardware, which may be related to technical errors associated with nonideal conditions and shorter operative times. An increase in the allocated amount of daytime operative time for orthopaedic trauma surgery has the potential to reduce minor complication rates for intramedullary nail fixation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".