Hip fracture (HFx) is a painful orthopedic emergency that commonly presents to the Emergency Department (ED). There are approximately 320,000 HFx diagnosed annually in the United States, with this number expected to increase as the population ages. It has previously been shown that patients with pain from HFx are undermedicated while in the ED, particularly in overcrowded facilities. Current treatment for ED patients who are experiencing pain from acute HFx is often with intravenous morphine sulfate (IVMS). Morphine can have many undesirable side effects, but of particular concern are delirium, hypotension and respiratory depression. These complications may be accentuated in elderly patients and may necessitate increased patient monitoring and greater utilization of limited ED resources.An alternative to systemic opioid analgesia involves peripheral nerve blockade. Anesthesiologists frequently perform nerve blocks in the peri-operative and post-operative period to control pain in patients undergoing hip surgery. Traditionally, nerve stimulators were used to place the nerve block. However, ultrasonography is being used with increasing frequency to facilitate placement of these peripheral nerve blocks. As Emergency Physicians (EP) become more facile with the use of bedside sonography, ultrasound guided peripheral nerve blockade for HFx may be ideally suited for the ED environment, where one injection could control pain for many hours. The 3-in-1 femoral nerve block (FNB), in which anesthetic is injected adjacent to the femoral nerve but also affects the lateral femoral cutaneous and the obturator nerves, has been shown to be as effective as morphine for pain control of HFx in the ED. Sonographic guidance has been shown to increase the success rate of this block, decrease the time to analgesia, decrease the amount of local anesthetic needed to achieve adequate regional anesthesia, and decrease the incidence of inadvertent intravascular injection.

To date, there has been limited research describing the utilization of ultrasound guided femoral nerve blocks in an ED setting. Beaudoin et al. performed a feasibility study demonstrating that EP could effectively perform ultrasound guided femoral nerve blocks. Reid et al. found a significantly decreased time to complete analgesia when using sonographic guidance compared to an anatomic landmark technique. In this later study, anesthesia was assessed by checking skin sensation. Neither of these studies utilized a 3-in-1 nerve block, which may provide greater pain relief for patients with HFx.

The fascia iliaca compartment block (FIB) is also effective for treating pain due to HFx. It has been shown in the pediatric anesthesia and pediatric emergency medicine literature that it provides adequate analgesia, and may provide more effective analgesia than the FNB for femur fractures in children. Most of the studies describe the FIB being performed using a technique based on anatomic landmarks. One recent study described ultrasound guidance of the FIB (UFIB) increasing the efficacy of the sensory blockade (12). UFIB has not previously been studied in the ED setting.

We attempted to determine (1) whether ultrasound guided peripheral nerve blocks (UPNB) could be safely performed in an ED setting, (2) whether UPNB would be more effective than standard treatment in controlling pain from HFx in which a 2.5 unit decrease in pain scores was considered clinically significant, and (3) which of two UPNB was superior for pain relief.