Can Mothers Identify the Seriously Ill Febrile Child

摘要

Children less than 24 months of age frequently have acute febrile illnesses. Often, these acute illnesses are indicative of serious problems, such as meningitis and bacteremia. A powerful method of detecting these serious problems is to observe the febrile child prior to the history and physical examination. Previous work has delineated six key observation items each with a three point scale (termed the Yale Observation Scales, YOS) which have been used successfully by pediatricians and pediatric nurses to identify the seriously ill febrile child. The study investigated whether mothers could use the Yale Observation Scales (YOS) reliably and whether the judgments of mothers using the scales or the judgments of control mothers were more sensitive for serious illnesses and had higher specificity and negative predictive accuracy for non-serious illnesses.