Reply To: Discussion: Skill 6- Triage (Vitals)

[Emmanuel]

(Leah) Scenario 3: Dehydration (Emmanuel N, Emmanuel T, Banessa, Apple, Koree)

A 5-year-old child is brought to the clinic by their parents with symptoms of vomiting, diarrhea, and lethargy over the past 24 hours.

1. Initial Assessment:

– Describe the steps you would take to gather information about the child’s medical history, the onset of symptoms, and any contributing factors.

• If the patient’s medical history is not present in the EHR, we could inquire the patient or the parents about the child’s previous medical history. We would ask for any previous conditions, surgeries, diseases, and medications of the child.

• The onset of symptoms could be assessed by the status of the urgency level. In this scenario and based on the symptoms, the child is in an urgent care situation.

2. Prioritization:

– Based on the symptoms presented, determine the urgency of the child’s condition using triage protocols. Explain why you categorized the patient as emergent, urgent, or non-urgent.

• Based on the symptoms presented we would classify the child’s condition as urgent. Dehydration can cause damage to the kidneys, heart, and brain. Even though the symptoms don’t seem harmful, it is important to treat them quickly. However, compared to someone who suffered an open wound from a gunshot or stab, these people would have to be attended first due to the dangers of infection or blood loss. Therefore, urgent care is the best placement for the child, since the severity level is not the highest in the triage protocol.

• Dehydration can lead to death if not treated immediately. Some of the symptoms include confusion, dark urine, and no urine.

3. Vital Signs Assessment:

– List the vital signs you would assess and the methods you would use to measure them for this child. Include how you would assess hydration status and any other relevant observations.

• A vital sign that we could use to assess the hydration status of the child would be by testing their conscious and confusion levels. If the child is completely passed out it is safe to assume that they are in a critical dehydrated situation. If the child is confused, we can assume that the children might be dehydrated to a midpoint critical situation.

• Since the child is vomiting and has diarrhea, we could use this information to assume that the child has lost more minerals and fluids. This means that the child might need urgent care, so that we could help replenish these lost fluids and minerals.

4. Immediate Interventions:

– Identify any immediate interventions that may be necessary for this child and explain the rationale behind them.

• An immediate intervention that may be necessary for the child would be taking them to the ER to restore the child’s body fluid balance as quickly as possible. The rationale behind this is to keep rehydrated the child, and keep them safe!

5. Communication and Documentation:

– Outline how you would communicate the patient’s status to the healthcare team and what information would be included in the documentation.

• We would respectfully communicate with the parents, and inform them that the children isn’t in a critical condition(death situation). However, for the safety of the child, we would advise the parents to pay more attention to the hydration levels of the child.

• Furthermore, we could advise the parents to buy “Electrolit” to keep the child hydrated. We could potentially give the parents a pamphlet informing them over how to avoid this situation.