Pediatric resuscitation can be a stressful experience. This session will review the basics of pediatric resuscitation using evidence-based approaches and seasoned clinical experience.

Marianne Gausche-Hill, MD, FACEP, medical director of the Los Angeles County EMS Agency, professor of clinical medicine and pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and EMS fellowship director at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center department of emergency medicine in Torrance, California, will lead “Back to Basics: Pediatric Resuscitation in 2015.”

Dr. Gausche-Hill will touch on a variety of topics relevant to pediatric resuscitation, including chest compressions, cuffed tubes, hyperoxemia, making medicine administration easier, and drugs for cardiac arrest.

One area that Dr. Gausche-Hill will cover is misconceptions about chest compression and ventilation. Many believe that a higher ventilation rate is always better, but she said that’s not necessarily the case. “One thing that will happen is poor return of blood back to the heart, which results in poor perfusion,” she said. “You don’t want to ventilate excessively, but I think people tend to do it because children have a higher metabolic rate, yet that’s with normal physiology.” She will talk about slowing down ventilation during resuscitation and focusing on appropriate coordination of ventilation and compressions.

Another area where Dr. Gausche-Hill sees confusion is with the use of oxygen. “Once there’s return of spontaneous circulation, we use 100 percent initially and then dial back aggressively. You have to dial back just like you do in adults,” she said. The goal should actually be around 94 percent to avoid hyperoxemia and secondary injuries to the brain.

Because time is always of the essence during pediatric resuscitation, Dr. Gausche-Hill will present recently published evidence on how the use of prefilled syringes stored on a resuscitation cart decreased both how long it took to administer medicine and medicine dosing errors.

Vanessa Caceres is a freelance medical writer based in Florida.