The Deteriorating Child: Recognition and Escalation — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

The Deteriorating Child: Recognition and Escalation 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. What the chart could not show
2. Zero, and still wrong
3. Letting him sleep
4. One row on the chart
5. Fifty minutes to find out
6. A chart that cries every hour
7. The fourth part of the call
8. Two calls, no answer
9. Moved, but not arrived
10. Twenty, twenty-four, thirty
11. Five of six, every time
12. One doctor until eight
13. Who comes, and how fast
14. Stable, and climbing
15. Low here, positive there
16. Reviewed, and nothing else
17. Seen, and still worried
18. Which number to watch

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: That she was stable at one moment, A record of the calls, Antipyretics, after, The name of the nurse who escalated and the exact time at, The number of calls made.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• A parent saying this is not my child is a trigger, not a comment.
• A scoring system without an override is a system that cannot hear you.
• Widening the interval is a decision with an author and a reason.
• One set is a photograph. Deterioration is a direction.
• A treatment resets the observation clock. Measure the answer, not the schedule.
• When a child’s normal is abnormal, score the change, not the value.

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 emergency and critical care case decks · pediatric reference values.