Search

The quality of pediatric emergency care may depend on the competence of the emergency department physicians. It is important to know whether parents and general pediatricians associate the quality of pediatric emergency care with the pediatric emergency medicine (PEM) training of the emergency department physicians. We designed the study to determine parental and pediatricians' opinion and expectation in regard to this question. Most of the surveyed parents' and pediatricians' recognize the importance of PEM training and believed that physicians trained in PEM can provide better emergency care for children. However, 53.8% of parents, especially Spanish speaking and with Medicaid/no insurance coverage, believe that the emergency care provided for their children by general pediatricians and PEM physicians is equivalent. The results of our study could be utilized by accredited PEM planners in the creation of strategies to ensure the quality of emergency care for children population., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Foreign body ingestions are all too common in children. The adverse effects of many of these ingestions are well known. We present an interesting case report of "Buckyballs" and the implications of ingesting or placing in other orifices these strong rare-earth magnets. We illustrate that these toys can be of possible disastrous consequences. Although these products were removed from the marketplace, there is still the possibility of negative consequences. Our aim was to inform the physician population of their persistence and negative effects.

Henoch-Schönlein purpura represents the most common form of systemic vasculitis in children. Although a very common cause of vasculitis, seizures are a very rare complication of this disorder. We report a 5-year-old boy who presents with no other clinical symptoms of the disorder other than a seizure. By presenting this case, we hope to expand the differential diagnosis of repeated seizures to include diseases in which the pathogenesis of diseases with small vessel vasculitis such as Henoch-Schönlein purpura is considered.