Acute Epiglottitis – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Acute Epiglottitis 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. Six hours from well
2. What the notes missed
3. Worse than it looks
4. Keeping him calm
5. Cultures and a cannula
6. The film request
7. In theatre
8. He stops breathing
9. Fully vaccinated
10. The first dose
11. Who takes the tablets
12. Who must be told
13. The kettle spout
14. A wide shadow
15. Croup that got worse
16. Through the scope
17. The alarm sounds
18. Coming off the ventilator

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Severe viral croup, Waking at night with noisy breathing, Pain far beyond what her throat shows, After induction in theatre, with the airway secured, Send him with a nurse, as the film is quick, Intravenous drugs with a muscle relaxant, Needle cricothyroidotomy before trying anything else, Immunisation excludes a bacterial cause of any kind, An intravenous third-generation cephalosporin, Only the baby, who is not yet fully protected, Nothing, as the laboratory will handle all reporting, Nebulised adrenaline, then home after four hours, Intubation in theatre for presumed epiglottitis, Heliox by mask and observation on the ward.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Drooling, muffled, sitting forward and hardly coughing: think of the epiglottis, not croup.
• No bark and no swallowing: that is not croup.
• A throat that hurts far more than it looks has its problem lower down.
• The calm child is keeping his own airway open: do not take that away.
• In epiglottitis the airway comes first, and the needle comes after it.
• The thumb sign is a textbook picture, not a step in managing this child.

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 case decks · pediatric reference values.