Infants Part I (1 Hour)

From personal experience I can tell you that assessing an infant can be pretty easy.  Rarely does the infant have complicated medical problems that require a comprehensive review of medications and illnesses.  Only a select few vital signs are required to make a qualified assessment of the patient. 

After safely arriving on scene and figuring out what happened, we try to get a general impression. The general impression is a simple concept that is often poorly explained. Simply stated, if the child looks really ill, the general impression will not be good. Once we arrive at the patient, we can get a general impression of parent/ guardian and child interaction, and then focus on the general impression of the patient. If you have taken courses on GeorgiaEMSAcademy.com before, you would know that we like to classify general impressions as good, bad, or ugly. If the patient looks good, the general impression is good and the patient will probably not require that much immediate attention. If the general impression is bad, it's time to act fast before the patient starts to look ugly. Acting fast means aggressively treating the airway, breathing, and circulation. If the general impression is downright ugly, then we will have to work quickly by addressing the airway, breathing, and circulation as well. In the intial stages of bad or ugly patients,, BLS maneuvers are very helpful at turning this patient around.. A tool that is used to assess the general appearance of a child is the Pediatric Assessment Triangle