Hypothermia – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Hypothermia 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. A figure that will not fall
2. The extra deflection
3. Lifting him out
4. It keeps falling
5. Holding the drugs
6. The fastest way to warm
7. Warming a stable child
8. White toes
9. Passing a lot of urine
10. A very slow pulse
11. Deciding to stop
12. Feeling for a pulse
13. Collapse on the ward
14. Cold indoors
15. Wrapping for the journey
16. Hot water on the hands and feet
17. No circuit available
18. Why the cold protects

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: It must be an error caused by the cold in the room, The J wave that accompanies deep cooling, Pulling hard on the arms usually dislocates the shoulder, The probe has slipped out of its correct position now, Withhold both until the core has risen past 30 degrees, Warm blankets and warmed fluid in this hospital, An extracorporeal circuit arranged without delay, Rub the toes vigorously until the colour comes back, Central pooling has switched off the water-saving hormone, Pace her externally until the rate reaches sixty, That the sample was almost certainly taken badly, Started compressions without any check at all, The vessels opening as he warms, in a depleted child, A thermometer fault that should simply be repeated.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• A reading that will not fall is the floor of the device.
• A hump after the QRS in a cold child is the J wave.
• Handle a deeply cold child as gently as you possibly can.
• The core can fall after rescue: that is afterdrop.
• Below 30 degrees: warm him before drugs and shocks.
• Cold arrest: aim for a centre that can run a circuit.

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.