Neonatal Fluid Balance and Sodium Disorders — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Neonatal Fluid Balance and Sodium Disorders 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. Less on the first day
2. What the scales are showing
3. Under the blue light
4. No salt in the bag
5. Dry for a stretch on day three
6. Orange marks in the nappy
7. Normal skin, worrying weight
8. Bringing the number down
9. Salt for a grower
10. Heavier than the chart allows
11. Drawn from the wrong arm
12. Faster than the plan intended
13. One number on one morning
14. Counting what came out
15. The chart that balanced
16. Ready to stop counting
17. What the mother takes home
18. Arriving with a rate alone

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Blood from the urinary tract, A syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone, Accept it but recheck in twelve hours, by, Averaged with yesterday’s, Count only the soaked nappies, A normal sodium, A daily weighing routine at home, A repeat sodium on arrival.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• The first days’ fluid plan is written against a diuresis that is supposed to happen.
• Early weight loss is a fluid shift, and a parent deserves to be told which.
• Under the lights the answer is usually more milk, not more fluid.
• Sodium waits for the diuresis; it does not lead it.
• A falling output is a question, not an instruction to turn the rate up.
• Urate crystals are harmless and they are still telling you something.

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.