Paediatric emergency medicine

Many subspecialities appear to have ‘a time’, a heyday when research and innovation in the field leads to rapid practice change and excitement around the paediatric world.

Consider, for example, the 1970s, with advances in metabolic paediatrics and endocrinology; the 1980s as the era of neonatology (ventilation, surfactant, antenatal steroids); the 1990s and evidence-based medicine and the advent of child protection as a specific area of expertise and the 2000s with genetics and public health.

For centuries, children with acute, unexpected illnesses, medical and surgical, traumatic and non-traumatic, accidental and non-accidental, have been brought in to the emergency department by their parents, in ambulances and by helicopter, for triage, assessment and treatment.

Until the fairly recent past, caring for these children was shared between general emergency physicians and (chipping in when necessary) paediatricians and anaesthetists. It seemed to work but maybe not as well as it could.

Paediatricians in...

from Archives of Disease in Childhood current issue https://ift.tt/2xsdAbU