Febrile infants
Infants with fever present a special challenge in the emergency department. Most of these children require large workups and admission to be sure that we aren’t missing serious bacterial infections or meningitis. The risks are high here and we need to make sure that we do the right thing for our smallest and youngest patients. We’ll talk about how to assess infants from the foot of the bed, how to get an effective history and physical, how to do a sepsis workup in this age group, and some tricks of the trade for how to do an LP on an infant.
UPDATE 11/11/2013- Thanks to listener Anna- I had a mixup at 21:30 when talking about which children to get cath UAs. When I said it, I mixed up the recommendations for circumcised and uncircumcised males. They are correct in the show notes. Here is the correct version, I will edit the audio when I get a chance:
Cath UAs on:
All CIRCUMCISED males under 6 months old
All UNCIRCUMCISED males under 12 months old
All females under 24 months old
There’s also a bonus section on pediatric UTIs and how to use a glidescope.
Febrile infants show notes (Word format)
Febrile infants show notes (PDF format)
Just FYI- EM Basic has a facebook site. If you “like” the page you’ll get notifications on each new episode. Feel free to leave a comment and start some conversations on the topics.
Finally, as promised- an international listener contacted me so I’d like to give him a shout out. Dr. Lars Lomberg is an EM physician in Germany where there are no formal EM training programs. He has a website for Emergency Medicine in Germany so if you can read German, check it out.
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