The Febrile Child Without a Focus — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

The Febrile Child Without a Focus 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 paediatric board, MRCPCH and licensing examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. Too young to look well
2. Where to put it, at nine months
3. Which of the two worries you
4. What the medicine proved
5. Where she sits on the chart
6. She cannot say what is wrong
7. Coming back a third time
8. Whether to take the blood
9. A normal result too early
10. Six days and still going
11. Reading the last number to change
12. What the leaflet has to say
13. Eight days versus twelve hours
14. Softened by what he took
15. Protection she never had
16. Whether to take the picture
17. Who the chart does not fit
18. Explaining the empty-handed discharge

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: A rectal reading, It excludes bacterial infection, It opens a different differential, As proportionate to his fever, The dose and timing of antipyretics, It does not alter the plan.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Under three months, the age decides it. Write down how old they are before anything else.
• Believe the parent’s fever. A normal reading in front of you does not cancel it.
• Watch them from the door before you touch them. That look is worth more than the number.
• Never let the paracetamol make the decision. It works on every fever there is.
• Mottled, or hard to rouse. Either one on its own is the top of the chart.
• Write the mother’s sentence in the notes, in her words. It is a clinical finding.

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 Infectious Disease case decks · pediatric reference values.