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Comment by bomdo | Hacker News Reader

Having recently had a child, I learned about APGAR and marveled how the emotional "is my baby ok" was put into a super easy process. The chart from the article can be followed by absolutely anyone and babies can be sent to specialists as needed - or not. As the article mentions, it may not get everything 100% right, but it's useful enough - and more importantly easy enough - to save a lot of lives.

I can highly recommend anyone to read about the process of medical emergency triage in general. It drastically reduces the knowledge needed to solve complex situations and gives you something to hold on to when things get hot. Seeing these stressful problems reduced to if-else flows was very inspirational for me for designing ways to tackle urgent issues in other areas of life, e.g. tech support, service requests or HR.

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The ABC's are helpful for just about any emergent medical situation. From first responders to paramedics, we are hammered to remember and implement the ABC's. You can do a lot with very basic knowledge.

Correcting problems with the systems associated with the ABC's is more knowledge and experienced based. A good basic first aid and CPR class will get you a lot of that knowledge. From there, staying calm and calling 911 is vital if you are US based.

A - Airway / B - Breathing / C - Circulation

After my daughter was born, my parents showed me the booklet containing the results of the routine examinations I had as a child (where I come from, this booklet has been standardized for decades, so it can be compared pretty easily). Interestingly, we both had the exact same Apgar scores 6 / 10 / 10 (scores are measured 1, 5 and 10 minutes after birth).

For the emotional "is my baby ok" aspect, before you are even interested in the Apgar scores, you automatically and instinctively do a quick "is everything there" check, even if you know that to be the case because of the ultrasound examinations.

That's a pretty typical score progression (it's very rare for a baby to be a 10 right right out of the gate).

It was great to hear him being 8/10 and soon up to 9/10. So comforting and removing all that unnecessary fear. Days and hours right before that moment were so exhausting that simple number was easy to process.

My father-in-law is a doctor and he jokingly told me when my daughter was born, that only the babies of doctors who work in the hospital get 10/10

> I can highly recommend anyone to read about the process of medical emergency triage in general

Any recommendations? I had a search about but didn't find anything much beyond basic explanations of the term.

Consider this chapter on assessment from the Trauma Nursing Core Course (1). The full provider manual may be hard to obtain, however.

(1) https://notendur.hi.is/thorsj/gogn/TNCC.pdf

Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto has some good discussions of complex care situations that are more or less driven by runbooks.

If you're in the US, a recommendation is to look up your local CERT[0] organization - they usually have free or low cost classes and other learning opportunities. Triage is an important part, as is preparing for disasters that are relevant for your community. Going further, a basic first aid and/or CPR class is good to get hands-on.

[0] https://www.ready.gov/cert

Isn't APGAR useful only for newborns?

Yes. It happens after birth. The paediatric nurse takes a look based on the checklist and ranks the baby out of 10. Our kid was an 8 but required NICU for the 2 they were missing. But if it's even lower they can immediately intervene, etc.

Indeed

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