Bone & Musculoskeletal
Trauma

• Describe a fracture precisely: open vs. closed, location, pattern, displacement, angulation, and shortening
• Apply the Salter-Harris classification to growth-plate injuries in skeletally immature patients
• Use the Ottawa Ankle and Knee Rules to decide when imaging is — and is not — indicated
• Perform a structured neurovascular assessment and recognize the red flags of compartment syndrome
• Apply splinting principles that immobilize the joint above and below without compromising perfusion
• Identify fragility fractures and the upstream, modifiable drivers of bone fragility
• Counsel on metabolic bone health: vitamin D, calcium, protein, and weight-bearing activity
• Describe congenital limb variation respectfully — documenting variation, not pathology

This module covers the orthopedic injuries clinicians actually meet — the rolled ankle, the wrist that landed wrong, the elderly hip, the child off the monkey bars — and the assessment skills that decide whether they heal well or poorly. It is rigorous on the mechanics: how to read a fracture, when to image, how to protect a limb, when minutes matter.

But it also asks a quieter question the busy department often skips: why did this bone break? A wrist fracture from standing height in a sixty-year-old is not just a wrist fracture — it is a window into a skeleton that has been losing ground for years. WestNet HealthOS was built to keep that window open, so the fracture clinic does not simply cast the bone and miss the person attached to it.

It is easy to picture the skeleton as dry, finished, structural — the part of us that outlasts everything else. Clinically, that picture is misleading. Bone is among the most dynamic tissues in the body: a collagen scaffold mineralized with calcium and phosphate, laced with blood vessels and nerves, and rebuilt continuously by two opposing crews.