Pediatric emergency care
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Pediatric emergency care · Jan 2010
Comparative StudyPatient characteristics and provider practice patterns for emergency contraception in a pediatric emergency department.
To describe epidemiologic and clinical characteristics of patients receiving emergency contraception (EC) in a pediatric emergency department (ED), practice variations for EC, and ED return visits after EC. ⋯ Reviewing recipients of EC from a pediatric ED suggests education is needed for both health care providers and adolescents. Although providers are generally following the most recent dosing guidelines, opportunities to prescribe EC to adolescent girls with complaints other than sexual assault seem to be missed.
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Pediatric emergency care · Dec 2009
Case ReportsBruising in infants: those with a bruise may be abused.
Bruising in the young infant is rare, and if present, this may be a manifestation of physical child abuse. Early signs of abuse, such as bruising, are often overlooked or their significance goes unrecognized resulting in poor patient outcomes. ⋯ This brief report presents 3 cases of nonmobile infants who presented to health care providers with bruising before a subsequent fatal or near-fatal event. These cases emphasize the importance of including abusive trauma in the differential diagnosis of an infant with a bruise or a history of easy bruising and the importance of initiating a thorough trauma evaluation immediately and concomitantly with any other workup for the causes of bruising in the noncruising infant.
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Pediatric emergency care · Dec 2009
Case ReportsBedside ultrasound diagnosis of pulmonary contusion.
A 10-year-old boy presented to the emergency department after being struck by a van while crossing the street. He complained of right side chest pain, and a chest radiography was suggestive of pulmonary contusion. The treating physician performed a bedside ultrasound that revealed a right-sided pulmonary contusion that was subsequently confirmed on computed tomography of the thorax. The sonographic features of pulmonary contusion are described, and the possible role of lung sonography in the assessment of pediatric thoracic trauma is discussed.
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Pediatric emergency care · Dec 2009
Comparative StudyAnalysis of parental and nurse weight estimates of children in the pediatric emergency department.
To evaluate the accuracy of parent and triage nurse estimates of children's weights in the pediatric emergency department. ⋯ Parents were more accurate at estimating children's weights than triage nurses but were within 10% of the children's actual weights only 79% of the time. Nurse estimates were highly inaccurate. Other methods to estimate patient weights should be used when actual patient weights are unobtainable.