Children’s Intensive Care Guide available
Children’s Intensive Care Guide will help thousands of children in a critical situation!
Today, the Children's Hospital Foundation and Children's Hospital specialists handed over the long and carefully developed Children’s Intensive Care Guide to Sarmīte Villere, Head of Emergency Medical Service, and to a representative of regional hospitals. Soon such a guide will be helpful to any doctor who provides emergency care for children. The Guide has been created with the support of the Children's Hospital Foundation and contributors, and it has been created by the Children's Hospital's team of reanimatologists and anaesthesiologists to ensure an equal level of providing the first-aid to children across Latvia.
This year within 7 months, the Emergency Medical Assistance Service provided assistance to 27, 000 children across Latvia. The book is a brief and concise summary on children-specific topics of intensive care, mainly related to the choice of medicines, their dosage and equipment, and the more commonly used algorithms. Although the basic principles of pediatric intensive care are similar to those of adult medicine - the rapid elimination of organ damage by the use of invasive treatment and patient monitoring methods, the choice of dosage of medicines and equipment suitable for children is greatly hampered by the large difference between the patients’ age and size — from newborns to young people who are almost reached the age of majority. This is especially true under stressful conditions for doctors who do not work with children on a daily basis, and residents in the training process. For this reason, Children’s Intensive Care Guide was created, the main purpose of which is to facilitate the rapid decision-making with respect to critically ill children both at the Children's Hospital and beyond it. The book will be available free of charge to professionals involved in the emergency assistance process.
"The Children's Hospital Foundation seeks to improve the health of children in different ways, but our goal is always the same — to help our child improve the health. The educational projects implemented by the Foundation are perhaps less apparent, but we are aware of their value and significance. Working tools and their quality are very important for doctors, thereby we created the Guide as a professional tool which is informative and practical, and easy to use. Sincere thanks to the contributor who saw the importance of this Guide and agreed to support its release, as well as to our team of physicians — Reinis Balmaks, Arnita Tomiņa and Ivars Veģeris, because the content was made thanks to their initiative and non-working time and indirect responsibilities," expressed the gratitude Liene Dambiņa, Head of the Children's Hospital Foundation.
"Every year in Latvia, about 800 children enter the Intensive Care Department, because for various reasons they need life-support treatment methods. In addition, several of these diseases are characterized by a ‘golden hour’ — a moment when very timely and right treatment methods can significantly improve the survival and mitigate the risk of persistent effects. Emergency assistance providers are, first of all, face such situations outside the children intensive care, and they happen often enough to reach almost every doctor during their careers. At the same time, such situations are too rare for all doctors to be able to maintain pediatric-specific knowledge and skills. ‘BKUS Children’s Intensive Care Guide’ is a pocket-sized manual with the necessary information about the rapid decision-making in the treatment of critically ill children," explained Reinis Balmaks, Reanimatologist of the CCUH and the Representative of the author's team.
