Pediatric Infectious Diseases Elective

Course Overview

The goal of this elective is to help students gain an understanding and begin developing a clinical approach in pediatric infectious diseases (ID). The pediatric ID clinical elective is primarily an inpatient experience. During your rotation, you will help manage inpatient consult questions from any unit across the children’s hospital for children with suspected infectious diseases.

Learning Objectives

• Residents will develop knowledge and skills for evaluating and treating hospitalized patients with a suspected infectious diseases.
  • Collect a detailed history that includes an exposure history (e.g. sick contacts, HEADSS exam, pet/animal exposures, travel, dietary habits, hobbies/activities), and a careful review of the medical chart (e.g. previous infections, recent antibiotic use).
  • Create an infectious disease differential diagnosis based on the history, physical exam, and available work-up.
  • Utilize available resources and/or guidelines to aid in the diagnosis and management of infectious diseases.
• Residents will make antibiotic recommendations for patients with presumed or identified infectious diseases.
  • Design empiric antibiotic regimens for patients with presumed infectious diseases.
  • Explain factors that influence antibiotic selection such as: intrinsic resistances, local resistance patterns, antibiotic mechanisms of action, side effects, PK/PD properties (e.g. route of administration, administration, tissue penetration, dosing frequency).
  • Identify reliable resources to aid in selecting appropriate antibiotics for various pediatric infectious diseases.
• Residents will understand different laboratory testing that is utilized to diagnose and manage infectious diseases.
  • Discuss the differences between different testing methods (e.g. culture vs PCR vs serologic).
  • Explain why it takes time after collecting a clinical specimen to identify a bacteria and obtain susceptibilities.
  • Explain antibiotic susceptibility testing, and how it incorporates antibiotic breakpoints and minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC).

Schedule of Activities

• Perform inpatient consultations for pediatric patients with suspected infectious diseases.
• Daily rounds with the pediatric ID team.
• Weekly didactic sessions.
• Conference participations in the weekly pediatric ID clinical conference and the joint medicine & pediatric ID clinical conference.

Didactic Activities:

• Peds ID clinical conference and joint Medicine and Pediatric ID clinical conference
• Self-directed learning questions. These questions are provided at the start of the rotation in the welcome e-mail and on Blackboard.
• Pediatric ID didactic sessions. It is anticipated that there will be two didactic sessions per week. Topics covered in these didactic sessions are flexible, and rotators are responsible for selecting a topic of interest for each didactic session. Resources are available to help select topics of interest.

Required Reading

Throughout the rotation, daily reading based upon questions related to ongoing patient care is expected. Pre-reading prior to the formal didactic sessions is encouraged.

Student Evaluations

Students will be evaluated by the Pediatric ID attending using the standard format provided by the School of Medicine.  In addition, verbal feedback will be provided on an on-going basis by the residents, fellow, and attending on the service as applicable.