Ideal Timing to Surgical Intervention of Ankle Fractures

My name is Brandon Kim. I'm one of the current fellows at the Santa Cruz Palo Alto Foundation Medical Group. I currently practice here in Santa Cruz, California.
 
Our team decided that looking into the surgical timing of ankle fractures was important due to the discrepancy in the literature, as well as the priority of ankle fractures that we saw at different institutions throughout our training and throughout our practice. The literature primarily advocates for either ORIF, meaning less than 24 to 48 hours, or there's other studies that support doing that there's no difference in surgical timing in terms of outcomes and there's really no clear consensus. Unfortunately, many of these studies do have smaller sample sizes. They don't stratify individual complications or look at other factors that might influence outcomes. The variety of practice paradigms amongst the different institutions prompted us to further look into the controversy of the surgical timing of ankle fractures.