Is it a Medical Emergency?

Even healthy kids get hurt and sick sometimes. In some cases, you may panic and want to head straight to the emergency room at the nearest hospital. In other cases, it’s more difficult to determine whether an injury or an illness needs the attention of a medical professional, or whether you can take care of it at home.

Ultimately, different problems require different levels of care. And when your child needs some sort of medical help, you have lots of options:

• Handle the problem at home. Many minor injuries and illnesses, including some cuts, poison ivy rashes, coughs, colds, scrapes, and bruises, can be handled with home care and over-the-counter (OTC) treatments.
• Call your doctor. This is a good option in most cases. If you’re unsure of the level of medical care your child needs, your child’s doctor — or a nurse who works in the office — can help you determine what steps to take and how to take them.
• Visit an urgent care center. An urgent care center can be a good option at night and on weekends when your child’s doctor may not be in the office, but it’s not necessarily a medical emergency. At these clinics, you can usually get things like x-rays, stitches, and care for other minor injuries that aren’t life threatening yet require medical attention on the same day.
• Visit a hospital emergency room. An ER — also called an emergency department (ED) — can handle a wide variety of serious problems, such as severe bleeding, head trauma, seizures, meningitis, breathing difficulties, dehydration, and bacterial infections.
• Call 911 for an ambulance. Some situations are so serious that you need the help of trained medical personnel on the way to the hospital. These might include if your child: has been in a car accident, has a head or neck injury, has ingested too much medication and is now hard to arouse, or is not breathing or is turning blue. In these cases it’s best to dial 911 for an ambulance.

As a parent, it’s hard to make these judgment calls if you don’t have a medical degree. You don’t want to rush to the ER if it’s really not an emergency and can wait until a doctor’s appointment. On the other hand, you don’t want to hesitate to get medical attention if your child needs treatment right away. If you have questions, the best thing you can do is call your child’s doctor. As your child grows — and inevitably runs into more sickness and calamities — you’ll learn to trust yourself to decide when it’s an emergency.

Remember that in cases when you know the problem is minor, it’s best to go to an urgent care center, see your doctor, or handle it at home because the more people who show up at the ER with non-emergencies, the longer everyone has to wait for care. When you can’t determine whether it's an emergency or not, call your child’s doctor.

Should I Go to the ER?

Here are some examples of when to go the ER:

• your child has some difficulty breathing or shortness of breath
• there’s a change in your child’s mental status, such as suddenly becoming unusually sleepy or difficult to arouse, disoriented, confused, not making sense
• your child has a cut or break in the skin that is bleeding and won’t stop
• your child has a stiff neck along with a fever
• your child has a rapid heartbeat that doesn’t slow down
• your child accidentally ingests a poisonous substance or too much medication
• your child has severe bleeding or head trauma

Other situations may seem alarming, but don’t require a trip to the ER. Call your child's doctor if your child has any of these symptoms: