Paediatric Elbow Injuries: Supracondylar Fracture — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

The Child’s Elbow: The Line, the Nerve, and the Fracture That Moves Later in 18 board-style clinical cases with worked explanations. Each case gives you a clinical vignette, four options, the correct answer, and an explanation of why each of the other three is wrong, with the guideline or textbook it follows named on the answer.

Board-style teaching questions for paediatricians and trainees preparing for paediatric board, MRCPCH and licensing examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. Sent home in a backslab
2. Reported as the ulna alone
3. Nothing feels numb
4. Does he need an operation
5. It will not straighten
6. Warm and well perfused
7. So the arm sits tidily
8. He will not move the arm
9. Pushed straight each evening
10. Bends and straightens fully
11. Talk of a transfer tonight
12. It still will not work
13. A gap of a few millimetres
14. Just a single stitch
15. He will not use the arm
16. It looks dislocated
17. Two years on
18. Told to keep waiting

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Swelling and pain, The nerve that runs behind that exact bony point, To stretch under sedation, Arrange a bone scan, A splint alone.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• The lateral fragment is pulled by muscle. Re-image it in a week.
• Every forearm film: does the radius point at the capitellum?
• A motor-only nerve is missed by any test that asks what the child feels.
• Wrist drop after a closed humeral shaft fracture: wait, do not explore.
• A blocked elbow after relocation: look for what went in with it.
• Every elbow fracture has a nerve lying on it. Test that one.

Work through the deck once for recognition, then again a week later to test yourself — each question gives the answer and explains why every other option fails.

More from this system: all MSK and orthopaedics case decks · pediatric reference values.