This is a post put together by Dr Andrew Weatherall as background preparation for a talk at the SPANZA Paeds Update from March 14, 2015. This is an update for the occasional paeds anaesthetist. It’s not about covering it all but hopefully there’s a few useful points in there to prompt a little thought and discussion.

For lots of people who do a bit of paediatric care, there’s a bit of nervousness around little people. It’s a bit disproportionate to the numbers of actual cases of course because paeds trauma is not common. In fact, rates are slowly going down.

There is also a common paediatric conundrum to deal with – what do you do with adult evidence? This is because overwhelmingly trauma literature deals in the bigger, smellier version of Homo sapiens.

So the challenge is to provide a refresher on something that is getting less common for…