Pediatric Hand Fracture Outcomes: How Often Do We Need to Operate?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: Pediatric hand fractures are frequent presentations to the emergency department. This study set out to evaluate the epidemiology, management, and outcomes, where care was imparted and by whom, and offer resource utilization suggestions regarding pediatric fractures presenting to a Canadian pediatric hospital. Methods: Records of patients from 0 to 18 years of age who presented to the British Columbia Children’s Hospital Emergency Department between November 1, 2016, and January 31, 2021, with metacarpal or phalangeal fractures were analyzed. Results: A total of 524 hand fractures were identified in 499 patients. Over 60% of fractures occurred in boys. The number of fractures peaked at the age of 11 years for girls and 12 years for boys. Open fractures accounted for only 4.0% of all fractures. Approximately 40% of fractures were epiphyseal growth plate fractures, with Salter-Harris II fractures being the most common diagnosis overall. Management was primarily nonsurgical, with 75% of fractures managed with immobilization alone and 23% of fractures managed with bedside closed reduction and immobilization. Of the fractures requiring closed reduction, the majority were performed by the emergency physician with a success rate of 82%. Only 2.3% of all fractures required surgery. Conclusions: Hand fractures are common pediatric injuries and make up a large proportion of emergency room visits. The majority of fractures do not require formal surgery and are well managed with immobilization alone or closed reduction by an emergency room physician and immobilization. Nonsurgical treatment offers very encouraging outcomes. A certain percentage of these simple fractures would likely benefit from primary care management alone and not require specialist intervention.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".