Pediatric Code Cards

Life-threatening emergencies or "code blue" situations provoke anxiety for most physicians and other health care professionals. This is especially true when the critically ill patient is an infant or a child. Paradoxically, however, comfort and familiarity with emergency procedures and drug doses is low when the patient is a child. This can be attributed to the relatively infrequent occurrence of life-threatening emergencies in children, which results in limited physician experience with such situations and the heightened anxiety everyone feels when dealing with a critically ill child. Also, emergency medical services outside of pediatric centers are infrequently provided by physicians familiar with the emergency care of children.²In a 1984 study, Seidel et al³presented evidence that emergency medical services do not adequately meet the