Doctors have been told that they should be more concerned about parents’ complaints that their children are ill in order to catch more serious infections when they occur. New guidelines have been drafted on how doctors deal with fevers to make sure that sickness is caught promptly.
NHS advice body, Nice, put out a warning yesterday that medical staff often miss things such as meningitis because they do not take parents seriously enough. Parents are the best judge of how their children feel, and therefore need to be taken seriously. To aid this problem it has created a traffic light system that can help health care staff and parents decide when it is best to be sent home and when it is best to see a specialist.
It can be very difficult to distinguish the difference between meningitis and a simple virus that will clear up on its own, but there is not a lot of leave way for mistakes as it only takes meningitis a few hours to kill. Most of the time fever will indicate that there is a bigger infection, but fever can also have a non-serious cause as well.
The new guidelines and system denote that the colour green can be used when a child has a normal skin colour, is smiling, and can respond to their name. Amber is when there are some risk factors present such as faster breathing, reduced activity, and difficulty waking.
Red would then denote high risk situations which include symptoms such as weak or high pitched cry non-blanching rash, and no response to his or her name. Seizures are another serious indication of problems.
