Smoke Inhalation Injury – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Smoke inhalation injury 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. Carried out of the bedroom
2. Not the heat
3. The exception
4. Looking for yourself
5. Acidotic and pink
6. Worse on the second day
7. Setting the ventilator
8. Blocking again
9. More than the sum says
10. The steroid question
11. Antibiotics on day one
12. Keeping the airways clear
13. The voice that stayed rough
14. Six months on
15. What the parents are asking
16. The night it started
17. Where she should go
18. After everyone goes home

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: A panic reaction to the frightening events of the night, Dry air carries little heat and is cooled before the cords, Steam is under pressure and forces the airway open, Repeat the examination of the face in four hours, Hydroxocobalamin, which binds the cyanide from the fire, A collection of fluid around the lung on that one side, Large breaths, to clear the carbon dioxide quickly, An antifungal agent added to the nebuliser, That a smoke injury needs more than the sum gives, A short course is reasonable and is likely to help her, Correct, because ventilated burns patients all need cover, Fluid restriction with a diuretic given twice daily, Direct examination of the larynx by an airway specialist, A chest film taken at the end of the school term.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Soot, a changed voice and smoke: the lungs are injured.
• Below the cords the injury is chemical, not thermal.
• Steam is the exposure that burns below the vocal cords.
• Facial soot tells you little: look below the cords.
• Fire, collapse and a huge lactate: treat for cyanide.
• The lungs declare themselves one to three days later.

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.