Pediatric Hand Fracture Referring Practices: A Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Pediatric hand fractures are common, but few require surgery; therefore, these fractures are often perceived to be overreferred. Our objective is to systematically identify and describe pediatric hand fracture referring practices. METHOD: A scoping review was performed, searching electronic databases and grey literature up to January 2018 to identify referring practices for children (17 years and younger) with hand fractures (defined as radiographically confirmed fractures distal to the carpus) to hand surgeons. All study designs were included, and study selection and data extraction were independently performed in duplicate by 2 reviewers. Outcomes included referring rates, necessity of referral, referring criteria, and management of fractures. RESULTS: Twenty (10 cross-sectional, 7 prospective cohorts, and 3 narrative reviews) studies reporting on referring practices or management of 21,624 pediatric hand fractures were included. Proportion of pediatric hand fractures referred to hand surgeons ranged from 6.5% to 100%. Unnecessary referral, defined as those fractures within the scope of primary care management, ranged from 27% to 78.1%. Ten studies reported referring criteria, with 14 unique criteria identified. The most common referring criteria were displacement (36.4%), loss of joint congruity (36.4%), and instability (36.4%). The most common justification for these criteria was increased likelihood of requiring surgery. The most common initial management was immobilization (66%-100%). Final management was provided by orthopedic or plastic hand surgeons with 0% to 32.9% of fractures requiring surgery. CONCLUSION: Referring practices vary widely in the literature. Major gaps in the literature include objective measures and justification for referring criteria and primary care education on hand fracture referring practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.075 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.024 | 0.025 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".