Welcome to Diagnosis Spotlight, a comprehensive educational course geared for orthopaedic surgeons at all career stages. This course is designed to address a critical aspect of orthopaedic practice—enhancing the accuracy of diagnosis of musculoskeletal injuries and conditions. Each course focuses on the pearls and pitfalls for avoiding missed diagnoses and diagnostic errors, with an emphasis on mastering clinical evaluation, recognizing specific imaging findings, systematically evaluating differential diagnoses, and reviewing injury treatment strategies. Enhance your diagnostic skills with real-life case studies, expert insights, interactive learning activities, quizzes, and access to supplemental resources from the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, Orthopaedic Video Theater, and AAOS books.
This Diagnosis Spotlight course reviews the diagnosis of radial head and neck fractures, focusing on clinical assessment, radiographic interpretation, and accurate diagnosis. General strategies for the management of these injuries also are discussed.
As an additional resource, this course includes the Revised Safer Dx Instrument, a tool developed by the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine to help identify potential diagnostic errors and guide safety improvement efforts that prevent future errors. The instrument assesses various aspects of a primary care encounter for breakdowns in the diagnostic process, and its use can help standardize the detection of diagnostic errors in primary care.
Learning Objectives
- List common reasons radial head and neck fractures often are missed on initial patient presentation.
- Explain the pathophysiology, etiology, and typical presentation of radial head and neck fractures.
- Review best practices for the clinical evaluation and diagnosis of radial head and neck fractures.
- Describe techniques to avoid diagnostic errors and the misdiagnosis of radial head and neck fractures.
- Summarize treatment strategies for radial head and neck fractures.
