Inaccurate weight estimations may cause non-responsiveness or increased adverse events and toxicity to interventions. The additional emotional stress and cognitive load of a paediatric resuscitation make the risk of incurring errors even higher and these errors are more likely to result in adverse events (patient harm) in the very young patient and the critically ill or injured child or infant with significant physiological insult. Ĭalculating, prescribing, preparing, and delivering accurate drug doses to children in the emergency department can be challenging at the best of times and consequently medication errors in children have been shown to be very common. Also, in paediatric emergencies, drug doses and intervention decisions are often based on estimated body weights. Weight determination is a major component of growth monitoring and it is critical to the institution of most preventive child health interventions included in the child survival strategies. The weight is an important element in making a number of diagnostic and treatment decisions including nutritional status assessment, calculating drug doses, sizes of equipment, use of treatment normograms, fluid therapy and energy levels for defibrillation. The determination of the weight of a child is an essential part of paediatric practice whether in the emergency unit, ward or clinic setting. There is need for re-validation and/or adjustments of the Broselow tape especially in children over 6 years old. Weight estimates obtained using the Broselow tape correlated better in children that are 6 years or younger compared to those in the older age categories. The proportion of estimated weights that was within 10- 20% of the actual weight was higher in the 1-6 years age categories compared to weight estimates in older age categories. After 5 years, the degree of overestimation rises sharply to 4.25% in 6, 9.25% in 7, 7.29% in 8 and 9.29%. Significant differences were observed from 7 up to 12 years. The mean weight difference between the two methods was not significantly different between the 1 to 6 years old category. Of the 1456 children studied, majority (84.2%) had normal Body-Mass-Index (BMI) while about 4.6% had a low BMI percentile for age. Weight was taken using standard weighing scale and Broselow tape. MethodĪ total 1456 children aged 1–12 years who satisfied the inclusion criteria were enrolled over a 2½ year period from two tertiary health facilities in Enugu state Nigeria. The study was carried out to determine the accuracy in the use of the Broselow Tape in weight estimation among Nigerian children. However, considering the variations in anthropometric measurements of children from different geographic locations, there is need to ascertain how accurate it is to estimate weight using the Broselow tape among children in Nigeria. The Broselow Tape which is a validated tape that is used to estimate weight based on length was developed using height/weight correlations from Western data. Despite its usefulness, weight estimation in children in certain conditions can be challenging particularly in emergency situations or in children who are severely ill or cannot stand on standard scales. It has a wide range of usefulness including assessing their nutritional status and drug dose calculation. Determination of weight in children is an important aspect of their assessment.
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