Screws to help the hip regain movement

The first blow isn’t always the fall itself. Sometimes it comes later, when the body no longer responds and the hip is broken like a broken hinge. Then the pain appears—dry, sharp, invasive—and with it, immobility, that immediate sentence that turns a bed into a border, a hallway into a distant dream, a step into a challenge.

A hip fracture usually requires prompt surgical repair, rehabilitation, and medication to control pain and prevent blood clots and infections. In the postoperative period, the patient must begin moving as soon as possible, often with the help of a walker or crutches.

In a nation where material limitations squeeze every last millimeter of medical practice, this urgent need has found an unusual answer in Sancti Spíritus, both for its simplicity and its enormous scope: taking an already acquired screw, subjecting it to a technical transformation process, and returning it to the operating room as the component needed to repair the fracture.

The idea originated in the Orthopedics and Traumatology Department of the Camilo Cienfuegos Provincial General Hospital, headed by Dr. Audrey Gutiérrez López, a second-degree specialist, and arose from a concrete need: to continue performing surgeries when the country was without cortical screws, essential for various osteosynthesis procedures, including many hip fractures, for more than a year.