Peds shelf

[Lara]

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Hi everyone,

I start my peds rotation Monday, and am very happy to be going from delivering babies to treating them. 🙂 Unfortunately I won't be doing inpatient peds in a children's hospital (let alone a major one), and in general the patient load is said to be really light. I guess that's partly due to the time of year. In that case I'd like to make an effort to use the extra spare time to hopefully nail the shelf. Are there any suggestions besides studying Blueprints and doing the Pretest questions? Is there anything I should look up from medicine, as that'll be my following clerkship?

Any general advice would be welcome too...thanks! Peds is a possibility I'm open to, so it'd be nice if I could honor this. I have two weeks outpatient (combined newborn nursery/general clinic), followed by inpatient and NICU.

 

[fourthyearmed]

The new First Aid for Pediatrics seems pretty good. I recently bought it although it wasn't out last year when I studied for the shelf so I used Blueprints and Pre Test along with a book of clinical cases (there are several out there so just pick one) and did well. Also just try and look up things about your patients whenever they have something interesting. If you are interested in peds you might want to go ahead and buy Nelsons Essentials or Current for Peds for this purpose.

 

[Fabio]

I read Blueprints and did the questions in the back of the book. I would HIGHLY recommend Appleton and Lange questions over Pretest!!! Some others may differ on this opinion. I thought A&L questions were tough, but if you read the answers and study them as another "text", you will learn a lot! Lots of general outpatient peds as well as zebra syndromes covered. I did these 2 books only and did pretty well on the shelf. First Aid was not available until later, but I always prefer "tried-and-true" books to newer stuff. Good luck with your rotation. Hopefully the lighter schedule will allow you some time to critically think about each patient and learn them well. The time of year is a big factor. I did peds around this time, too, but we stayed pretty steady on the census.

 

[ussdfiant]

Hey Lara, how's West Penn treating you? I am moving your post to the Clinical forum where I think you'll get more responses. BTW, I am also doing Peds this block at Temple. FWIW, I have Nelson and Blueprints. Do you guys also have to do the CLIPP cases?

 

[pikachu]

I did Blueprints and Pretest and did not do that well on the shelf - I did the same set of books for other shelf exams and did much better. Infectious diseases seems to be the main focus for the Peds Shelf so I would concentrate on that material in retrospect. Otherwise it is a hard exam (much harder than Medicine) - Good Luck

 

[Esco]

as a person who just tookt the test two days ago i would highly recommend doing the comprehensive exam at the end of NMS, very comparable to the actual shelf and a nice way to gauge how prepared you are...it's not bad at all, especially if you've had medicine---there is a large amount of pathognomonic stuff---"boot shaped heart, honey-crusted lesions etc." good luck

 

[Lara]

Hey ussd,

West Penn's good, I'm pretty happy I decided to come. No one's really mentioned it to me but apparently we do have CLIPP - bleh.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone! The Olympics are distracting, but I'll do my best to crack down - especially since you have to score above 1 SD on the shelf to honor.