Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
-
In paediatric resuscitation, for a rapid and accurate estimate of children's weight, the Broselow tape can be used in children who are 46-144 cm tall. The Broselow tape has previously been found to provide the most accurate estimate of children's weight internationally, but it is not known how many fall outside the range of the tape, or whether such children can be assumed to be of adult weight, or how otherwise to estimate the weight of these children. ⋯ The Broselow tape is inappropriate for use in most children over 10 years old. Children too tall for the tape cannot be assumed to be of adult weight; to do so would imply an average overestimate of 30%. Weight estimates in older children could be based on MAC.
-
Transport of critically ill children has become necessary following centralisation of paediatric specialist services. Children's Acute Transport Service (CATS) retrieves critically ill children in the Greater London area. Our teams have had to stop during these journeys to assist in road traffic accidents or ill passers-by. ⋯ Our teams had to stop on 12 occasions over this period amounting to an incidence rate of 1 per 959 ambulance journeys. Although this is an infrequent occurrence, the impact on the retrieved patient and service delivery could be significant. We would like to direct the attention of transport services to this problem.
-
To evaluate the construct of triage acuity as measured by the South African Triage Scale (SATS) against a set of reference vignettes. ⋯ The results of this study provide an alternative to evaluating triage scales against the construct of acuity as measured with the SATS. This method of using 80% consensus vignettes may, however, systematically bias the validity estimate towards better performance.