Croup and Upper Airway Obstruction in Children: Board Questions

What this deck covers

Croup and Upper Airway Obstruction in 18 board-style clinical cases with worked explanations. Each case gives you a clinical vignette, four options, the correct answer, and an explanation of why each of the other three is wrong, with the guideline or textbook it follows named on the answer.

Board-style teaching questions for paediatricians and trainees preparing for board, MRCPCH and Prometric examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. Barking at two in the morning
2. When the noise does not stop
3. Mild enough to go home
4. When the steroid has not worked yet
5. Drooling and afraid to lie down
6. Do we need a picture of his neck
7. Croup that got worse, not better
8. He will not turn his neck
9. Trismus and a pushed-over uvula
10. Stridor minutes after a biscuit
11. Third time this winter, no cold
12. Two doses and no change at all
13. Noisy after the tube came out
14. A grey membrane over the tonsils
15. Safe to send him home
16. Should we sit in the bathroom
17. Why a millimetre matters so much
18. Quieter, and much worse

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: The barking quality of the cough that brought him in, A single dose of oral dexamethasone, Bacterial tracheitis, A retropharyngeal abscess, A peritonsillar abscess, Intramuscular adrenaline into the outer thigh, Recurrent spasmodic croup, Diphtheria.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Listen to the cough down the phone. It is one of the few diagnoses you can make that way.
• The child who goes quiet is not getting better. Less noise can mean less air.
• Even the child going home gets the steroid. That is the whole message of the trials.
• Never discharge on the adrenaline. It fades in two hours and the child comes back worse.
• Sit on your hands and pick up the phone. Every procedure here is a way of making it worse.
• The film costs you a distressed child with a narrow airway and buys you nothing.

Work through the deck once for recognition, then again a week later to test yourself — each question gives the answer and explains why every other option fails.

More from this system: all Respiratory Board Questions case decks · pediatric reference values.