Princess Margaret Hospital and Child and Adolescent Health Service – Kids Health WA, PMH Emergency Department Guidelines Team – DISCLAIMER:
These guidelines have been produced to guide clinical decision making for the medical, nursing and allied health staff of Princess Margaret Hospital and Child and Adolescent Health Service (CAHS) WA. They are not strict protocols, and they do not replace the judgment of a senior clinician. Clinical common-sense should be applied at all times. These clinical guidelines should never be relied on as a substitute for proper assessment with respect to the particular circumstances of each case and the needs of each patient. Clinicians should also consider the local skill level available, and their local area policies before following any guideline.
The guidelines are also not designed to replicate a text book and are deliberately brief. Their purpose is to provide the clinician with practical advice regarding initial assessment and management information for many of the common and some less common presentations to the ED.
These guidelines were produced by the ED Guidelines Team within Princess Margaret Hospital for Children, in conjunction with sub-specialist surgery and medical departments and pharmacy. Whilst we have endeavoured to achieve consensus between departments and clinicians, the guidelines do not necessarily represent the views of all clinicians within CAHS.
The PMH ED Guidelines Team have made every effort to ensure that the information provided on this site is correct, however we strongly encourage users to verify the information, especially medication doses, through independent sources. The authors accept no responsibility for any inaccuracies, changes to procedure after publication of the document, or outcomes of any treatment regime recommended within these guidelines.
The information available on this site is targeted to clinicians only. If you are a patient, parent, carer or other community member using this site, you should seek assistance from a health care professional when interpreting these materials and applying them to your individual circumstances.
This site provides links to other websites as a service. Providing a link to another website does not constitute PMH ED or CAHS endorsement or approval of the website, its owners or operators, or any information, products or services offered on the website. We have no control over the content of material accessible on any sites that are cross-referenced. It is the responsibility of the user to make their own decisions about the relevance or accuracy, currency and reliability of information found on those sites. We cannot guarantee that these links will work all of the time and have no control over the availability of the linked pages.
Other websites are welcome to link to any of the webpages on this site, except where the page is protected by a security feature such as a login. We recommend linking to pages rather than directly to documents such as PDFs as file names can sometimes change when they are updated. It is less likely the webpage addresses will change.
