Pediatric emergency care
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A convenience sample of 60 children, aged five to 12 years, reporting to Kuwait government hospital emergency departments was studied. All were native Arabic speakers. Our aim was to compare the diagnostic usefulness of the pain information provided by children and by accompanying adults when interviewed under standard emergency department conditions. ⋯ Most children provided useful pain information. Mothers received consistently higher scores for their VAS descriptions than their children did; otherwise, the pain data provided by adults were not judged to be significantly more useful. When clinicians and teachers were asked to differentiate which data they thought had been provided by a child and which by the accompanying adult, nearly half of their decisions were wrong.
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Pediatric emergency care · Aug 1991
A one-year series of pediatric prehospital care: I. Ambulance runs; II. Prehospital communication; III. Interhospital transport services.
During a 12-month period ending on November 30, 1988, all ambulance arrivals at a pediatric emergency department (ED), all prehospital communications with this ED, all first-responder ambulance runs on Oahu and the state of Hawaii, and all neonatal/pediatric interhospital transports were examined to evaluate pediatric prehospital care. Handicapped patients were more likely to use an ambulance, and their care was more likely to be perceived as a weakness on the part of ambulance personnel. Poorer communication clarity was associated with longer duration of communication. ⋯ Mean transport times were shorter on Oahu than on the outer islands. Premature newborns and handicapped children commonly required interhospital transport. The care of children can be improved by addressing some of the identified problem areas, eg, improving prehospital communication and improving the training of prehospital personnel in the care of infants and handicapped children.
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Wooden foreign bodies in the extremities are frequently not suspected at initial presentation. Most often, these foreign bodies are not visualized radiographically. ⋯ In our case, a truly radiolucent wooden foreign body was well visualized on plain radiographs. The atypical appearance resulted in misinterpretation, and proper diagnosis and treatment were delayed.