Newborn Procedures at the Cotside — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Newborn Procedures at the Cotside 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. Where the lancet goes
2. Four goes and a bruise
3. Barely covering the bottom
4. Antibiotics first, tap later
5. Too sick to turn
6. Clearing as it goes
7. Somewhere near the liver
8. Running before the picture
9. High or low, and why
10. After it has come out
11. Checked before the feed
12. Nobody asked the parents
13. Sudden and getting worse
14. After the needle
15. Two in the morning
16. Asked to step outside
17. Written up afterwards
18. Still in, three weeks on

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: The centre of the heel, A fifth attempt on the other heel, A higher contamination rate, Advance it a further two centimetres, Start it and stop if the film is abnormal, Air insufflated while listening over the stomach, Increase the ventilator pressures, The trainee’s confidence, A note that consent was taken, The technique used to secure each device.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• The heel prick is a procedure with a bone underneath it, and the map matters.
• Two failed attempts is a technique problem; four is a decision problem.
• An under-filled blood culture is not a smaller test; it is a less reliable one.
• Antibiotics take the growth away and leave the diagnosis behind.
• A deferred tap is an appointment, not a cancellation.
• Blood that clears is the operator; blood that does not is the patient.

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 neonatology case decks · pediatric reference values.