This past September, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published its new clinical practice guidelines for the diagnosis and management of initial Urinary Tract Infections (UTI) in febrile infants and children. The last guideline for UTIs was published in 1999. What’s in the new guidelines that Emergency Physicians should know about?

Business has been steady in the pediatric emergency department this afternoon. You’ve seen a wide range of cases today, which has been fortuitous as you have a medical student shadowing you who wants to “learn the ropes.” The nurses put a new patient in bed 2. You couldn’t ask for a better, basic teaching case. It’s a 4-month-old male with a fever.

It’s a nice spring day when you get the call from the charge nurse that there’s a new patient for you to evaluate in the psychiatric area of the ED. It’s a 14-year-old boy who was brought in by the local police after he was found trespassing in a neighbor’s yard and collecting a plastic bagful of “Freon”-type refrigerant gas from their air conditioning unit.

Whenever emergency physicians prescribe drugs for children, the potential exists to make mistakes. A lot has been written about medication errors and how to lower your risk of making them.

You smile as you dispatch the resident to check out a 17-year-old girl with a chief complaint of migraine headache. Migraines can be so satisfying to treat... Yeah, you should have known it wasn’t going to be this straight forward.

With increased use of ultrasound, small bowel intussusception is becoming more frequently recognized. The most important predictor of whether it will need to go the OR is length greater than 3.5 cm.

It’s the day shift and for once the pace is rather mellow in the Pediatric ED. You’ve had time to check your email, finish a cup of coffee and do a little teaching with the medical student. The resident comes down the hall to present his next case. Time to shake off the inertia and get on with the business at hand.

This phone call certainly gets your attention, even in the middle of a busy shift. It’s a local health department clinic sending you a newborn they think has neonatal herpes. You gear up to see a baby who may be severely ill. You clear out a room, assemble the residents and rapidly review what you know about neonatal herpes virus.