Observational Assessment in the Febrile Infant

* Abbreviations: SBI — : serious bacterial infection UCS — : unstructured clinical suspicion YOS — : Yale observation scale Febrile infants 10; of the 23 infants with meningitis assessed by UCS, only 11 had high scores. The YOS was developed to capture the instinctive clinical judgments that pediatricians make through observation to assess a child’s degree of illness.2 In analyzing 186 domains (eg, motor behavior) of observation data used to formulate these scales, ∼60% focused on the child’s response to stimuli.3 To accurately … Address correspondence to Paul L. McCarthy, MD, Department of Pediatrics, Yale School of Medicine, 333 Cedar St, New Haven, CT 06520. E-mail: paul.mccarthy{at}yale.edu