Fractures of the scaphoid bone in the wrist are among the most common broken bone injuries. Traditionally, they have been healed by immobilising the wrist in a plaster cast but over the last two decades, surgeons have increasingly fixed the injury in surgery, by putting a small screw across the break. However, before this study, ...

UK ambulance staff report lasting and troubling memories of being called to suicides. But in a small qualitative study, they said there was little acknowledgment in the workplace that such events are traumatic. This is important since someone exposed to suicide is known to be themselves at greater risk of suicide. Each worker interviewed had ...

Patients have a legal right to know when something goes wrong with their care. But previous research has shown that they do not always get a satisfactory explanation. Researchers in Leeds and Bradford explored the expectations and challenges faced by both patients and healthcare professionals in talking about clinical errors. They found patients and professionals ...

Early weight-bearing in a below-knee rigid boot, a functional brace, following ruptured Achilles tendon can achieve similar results to traditional plaster casting. This NIHR-funded trial included 540 people, and after nine months there appeared to be no difference between the two treatments in terms of how well patients recovered from their injury. The functional brace ...

Injecting a ruptured Achilles tendon with a small sample of a person’s own plasma, without the red blood cells, has no functional or other benefit. Plasma rich in platelets and white blood cells for the acute injury was compared with placebo. The NIHR-funded trial involved 230 adults with acute Achilles tendon rupture (the tendon which ...

Fixing a displaced broken wrist with wires is as effective as fixation with locking plates in the long term. Wrist function and pain continue to improve in the five years following either operation, with no evidence of a difference between the two treatments. In 2014, a trial comparing the use of Kirschner wires and locking plates ...

In My Signals, health and social care staff and service users tell us what research is important to them and why they feel others need to know about it. In this collection, we asked seven occupational therapists to tell us which Signals have interested them most and explain why they feel the findings are worth ...

Outcomes for ruptured Achilles tendons appear similar irrespective of the choice of intervention. This systematic review and meta-analysis found that while the risk of re-rupture with corrective surgery was small at 2.3%, with conservative management (immobilisation in a cast), the rate was only 3.9%. The complication rate at 4.9% was three times higher in those ...

The rates of the five most common types of poisoning in young people have increased three to five-fold from 1998 to 2014 and is cause for concern. A study including more than 1.7 million young people aged 10 to 24 in the UK found records of 31,509 people who had been treated for poisoning (2% of the ...

Negative pressure wound dressings are neither more nor less effective than standard wound dressings for severe open fractures of the lower leg. Any difference between groups was neither clinically important nor statistically significant. The outcomes included self-rated disability at one year, quality of life and deep surgical site infections at one month which occurred in ...