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.

Intranasal analgesia are fast, effective and easy to administer to children. Are you taking advantage of this delivery option?

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.