Table 1.

Common orthopaedic scenarios selected as prompts for clinical letters, covering both elective and fracture clinical settings

Category	Case vignette
Elective case	Hip arthritis – total hip replacement. Knee arthritis – non-operative treatment. Carpal tunnel syndrome – surgical decompression. Lumbar disc prolapse – nerve root block.
Fracture clinic	Distal radial fracture – non-operative. Clavicle fracture – non-operative. Proximal humerus fracture – surgical fixation. Olecranon fracture – surgical fixation. Midshaft ulna fracture – non-operative. Biceps rupture – for further imaging. Buckle fracture – discharge. Quadriceps rupture – for further imaging. MCL rupture – non-operative. Weber A ankle fracture – discharge. Bimalleolar ankle fracture – surgical fixation.

ChatGPT and GPT-3 were then prompted to write clinical letters with the following prompts, for elective and fracture clinical cases, respectively: ‘Write an outpatient clinic letter for the following patient to the patient and their GP:’ and ‘Write a letter to the patient and their GP about the following:’.

GP, general practitioner; GPT, Generated Pre-trained Transformer; MCL, medial collateral ligament.