Emergency medicine Australasia : EMA
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Emerg Med Australas · Dec 2007
Make your Best Guess: an updated method for paediatric weight estimation in emergencies.
For children requiring weight-based resuscitative measures, it is often difficult to obtain an accurate weight. In these cases, it is common practice to estimate the weight based on age. As the average weight of Australian children has increased over the last two decades, the widely used advanced paediatric life support (APLS) method might systematically underestimate weight in paediatric patients. ⋯ The present study devised an age-based method for paediatric weight estimation which should more accurately predict weight than the widely used APLS formula.
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Emerg Med Australas · Dec 2007
External validation of the Best Guess formulae for paediatric weight estimation.
A new method for estimation of weight in children based on their age has been proposed. The present study aims to validate the Best Guess formulae in a new population of children. ⋯ The Best Guess formulae performed moderately well in estimating children's weight, but had a tendency to overestimate weight, particularly in children with lower body mass index.
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Point-of-care ultrasound in the prehospital and retrieval environments has now become possible owing to decreased size and weight, and increasing robustness of some ultrasound machines. This report describes the initial experience of point-of-care ultrasound by an Australian critical care retrieval service using a portable ultrasound machine.
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Emerg Med Australas · Oct 2007
Identifying severe community-acquired pneumonia in the emergency department: a simple clinical prediction tool.
To identify independent predictors of severe pneumonia in a local population, and create a simple severity score that would be useful in the ED. ⋯ This provides a practical tool that can be used to 'flag' impending patient demise. Its advantages are that it is simple, uses predictive variables, does not require invasive testing, and removes bias regarding patient age. Like other tools, its accuracy is not perfect, and it should only be used to augment clinical judgement.