What is an ankle fracture?

So Mr. Mishlik, can you please explain to us what an ankle fracture is? So ankle fractures are a very common injury that we see here at St. Mary's. With all the admissions that we have through our major trauma centre, a third of the orthopaedic injuries usually involves the lower leg, including the foot and ankle. so just to remind you and your patients a little bit about the anatomy here we've got three main bones involved which form the ankle joint so you've got your large shin bone called the tibia you've got the smaller bone called the fibula and you've got the articulating surface of the talus which together as the three will form the ankle joint and you can have a fracture of either the fibula the medial malleolus or the tibia and sometimes you can even get fractures of the talus but the common injuries are the fibula fractures and the medial malleolus of the talus oh sorry of the tibia so an example would be something like let's show an injury that's occurring here You can see the ankle inverts and the patient results in a fracture of the outside bone called the fibula but if the ankle continues to invert and pushes around further they'll break the back of the tibia and if it twists further still they will end up breaking the inside of the ankle called the medial malleolus. I'll just finish for that to happen and you'll see the last bit there okay so you'll get simple fractures ankle fractures such as this we would call this a Weber A fracture and we can treat these very easily in a walking boot patient is put in either a cast or a boot and my preference would be a boot and the patient is allowed to walk on it straight away. Whereas comparing that to this side here, this is what we call a Weber C fracture, and here you can see that the fracture extends quite high and there is some movement in the bones, i.e. the joint is subluxed or dislocated and therefore this cannot be treated without an operation and the patient will need an operation push the bones back into the right place and we'll need some metal work such as the plate and screws to hold it back in place.