The AAP Textbook of Pediatric Care states "Gender assignment in patients with genital ambiguity should be made only after careful investigation by a multidisciplinary team; increasingly, surgical decisions are delayed until the child is able to participate in the decision-making process." A karyotype and endocrine evaluation should be performed to detect intersex conditions or hormone deficiencies that have major health risks (i.e. salt-wasting). If the penis is small, testosterone or human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) injections may be given with consent to enlarge it before surgery if this will increase the chance of a successful urethral repair.Surgical repair of severe hypospadias may require multiple procedures and mucosal grafting. Preputial skin is often used for grafting and circumcision should be avoided before repair. In patients with severe hypospadias, surgery often produces unsatisfactory results, such as scarring, curvature, or formation of urethral fistulas, diverticula, or strictures. A fistula is an unwanted opening through the skin along the course of the urethra, and can result in urinary leakage or an abnormal stream. A diverticulum is an "outpocketing" of the lining of the urethra which interferes with urinary flow and may result in posturination leakage. A stricture is a narrowing of the urethra severe enough to obstruct flow. Reduced complication rates even for third-degree repair (e.g., fistula rates below 5%) have been reported in recent years from centers with the most experience. However, typical complications in urethroplasty for severe hypospadias can lead to long surgical cycles of failure and repair, and side effects may include loss of sexual or urinary function.
A urinary opening that is not surrounded by glans tissue is more likely to "spray" the urine, which can cause a man to sit to urinate because he cannot reliably stand and hit the toilet. Chordee is a separate condition, but where it occurs, the downward curvature of the penis may be enough to make sexual penetration more difficult. For these reasons or others, people with hypospadias may choose to seek urethroplasty, a surgical extension of the urethra using a skin graft.Surgery can extend the urinary channel to the end of the penis, straighten bending, and/or change the foreskin (by either circumcision or by altering its appearance to look more typical ("preputioplasty"), depending on the desire of the patient. Urethroplasty failure rates vary enormously, from around 5% for the simplest repairs to damage in a normal urethra by an experienced surgeon, to 15-20% when a buccal graft from the inside of the mouth can be used to extend a urethra, to close to 50% when graft urethral tubes are constructed from other skin.When the hypospadias is extensive–third degree/penoscrotal–or has associated differences in sex development such as chordee or cryptorchidism, the best management can be a more complicated decision. The world standard (UN and WHO) forbids nonessential surgery to produce a "normal" appearance without the informed consent of the patient, and the American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends but does not require the same standard.