Helen Salisbury: Early warning scores and medicine by numbers

Abstract

“Do you remember that child you saw two days ago?” All doctors dread what might come next: we fear that something bad has happened because we missed a clinical sign or made a poor judgment. This kind of worry keeps us all alert, even at the end of a busy day as the duty doctor. Hospitals have developed scoring systems to help medical and nursing staff gauge how sick a child is, and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has suggested that these should be rolled out in the community.12 There could be advantages not only in improving detection of children at risk of deterioration but also in shared understanding and …