Ped's CPR CASE QUIZ

[chelleak]

Sorry but I was always told to treat the patient not the machine. You don't know how many times I've had a situation where the leads have been knocked off. Check your patient!

[Aussieaid]

I have to agree with the check pulse first group. I've worked in a PICU for 8 years and can't tell you the number of times I've had a perfectly calibrated, previously beautiful art. line waveform go suddenly flat or dampened due to arterial spasms or positioning and because you aren't sure of the cause you always check the patient first. The first thing you learn in an ICU is look at your patient and not the monitor because equipment can always fail. Unfortunately especially in the ICU environment people rely too much on the machines and forget the basics. I've seen people fiddling around trying to trouble shoot a machine instead of treating the patient and actually assessing the patient themselves. I've also had patients where the monitor numbers and waveforms look good but the patient is definitely not ok.

A lot of scenarios can be misleading because sometimes they are trying to get you to go back to basics when people want to go straight to ALS. This scenario wasn't very well presented by AHA either. The child would definitely already be on a monitor and PICUs don't carry AED's. In this scenario asystole would probably not be the presenting rhythm either so I think they could have written a better scenario to start with that wouldn't be so confusing.

Having said all that I appreciate what you were trying to do WANTYNU. The information is a good review of some of the changes in thinking in regards to PALS.

Cheers all