Electrical Injury in Children — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Electrical Injury in Children 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. Chewed through a lamp flex
2. A hairpin and a socket
3. A neighbour reaching out
4. Sheltering under a tree
5. The junior wants to treat it
6. Retrieving a kite
7. Four hours, and still brown
8. Thrown across the room
9. A radio in the bath
10. Two children, one fence
11. Sparking in a field
12. She cannot hear on one side
13. Back to himself at three weeks
14. The trainee wants to operate
15. His father saw him stiffen
16. Four on the ground
17. The department is busy
18. Three letters, no reply

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: As a transient paralysis after a strike, Because the pain is from a fracture, A normal blood pressure for age, An injury to the brachial plexus, Drag him clear by his clothing, A fractured base of the skull, Recurrent arrhythmia, As a seizure, A fixed period of six hours from the shock.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• An oral commissure burn bleeds when the eschar separates. Warn the family before they go.
• Low voltage, well, normal tracing: home. Reserve monitoring for the rest.
• Nobody touches the child until the supply is off.
• Paralysis after lightning is usually transient. Reassess before you operate.
• The fern pattern after lightning is not a burn. No dressing, no referral.
• After high voltage, judge the limb and not the skin.

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.