Fantoms
Checking normal babies: NICE work or redundant ritual?
The NICE guidance on postnatal care, especially with regard to neonatal care, was greeted with some surprise by many paediatricians so we felt the subject deserved closer scrutiny and perhaps an alternative view. Even more recently the UK Newborn Screening Programme Centre has started to take an interest in the neonatal examination, so Green and Oddie’s review could not be more timely. Readers may be interested in their assessment of the use of pulse oximetry—should it be routine, or reserved for babies with heart murmurs? They also point out that even the individual components of the examination are not good “screening tests” in any rigorous sense of the word, but that the examination as a whole has a value that goes beyond hips, heart and eyes. So it’s a qualified thumbs up, so long as we don’t pretend it can do things that it can’t. See page F389
Putting the tension back in oxygenation
Those of us brought up on transcutaneous oxygen monitoring (TcPO2), in the days before the universal adoption of pulse oximetry, have noticed the different behaviours among doctors and nurses that the use of each of these modalities generates. It is not …
