Neonatal Meningitis – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Neonatal Meningitis 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 it comes from
2. Grown in the blood
3. How long
4. Forty-eight hours in
5. The wrong cephalosporin
6. The toddler’s treatment
7. Citrobacter
8. Watching the head
9. Still unwell
10. Covered in labour
11. Reading the glucose
12. The rest of the family
13. The next baby
14. The other twin
15. Soft and flat
16. No stiff neck
17. Cold, not hot
18. Why amoxicillin

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Meningococcus and Staphylococcus aureus, Nothing more, since he is already improving, Ten days in total, as for most bacterial sepsis, A second tap to confirm the fluid has become sterile, It causes deafness in the first month, Give it, as for any child with bacterial meningitis, Imaging for abscesses, His weight each morning, A subdural collection, They cover the first week, not later infection, A urine glucose measured on the same day, Everyone living in the house needs rifampicin today, Nothing, unless her swab is positive, Prompt assessment, as her risk is raised.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• In the first month, meningitis comes from the birth canal.
• A positive blood culture in a newborn earns a look at the spinal fluid.
• Gram-negative meningitis in a newborn: three weeks, not two.
• In Gram-negative meningitis, prove the spinal fluid is clean.
• In a jaundiced newborn on calcium, ceftriaxone is the wrong cephalosporin.
• What helps the toddler does not transfer to the newborn.

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.