Welcome to the Emergency Medicine Cases podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Anton Hellman, bringing you Canada's brightest minds in emergency medicine

from EMC Studios in Toronto.

You might be surprised to learn that the prevalence of critical cardiac disease in infants

is almost as high as the prevalence

of infant sepsis. And if you're like me, you don't really feel quite as confident managing

sick infants with critical heart disease as you do managing sepsis. Critical congenital heart defects

have an incidence of about two in 1,000 live births with about half of those infants

discharged home from hospital with a missed congenital heart lesion, and about half of those kids

will have critical lesions that end up in your ED. Unfortunately, these critical congenital

heart defects are often missed in the ED and sometimes

lead to death.

For a bunch of different reasons, there's currently more children with congenital heart

disease presenting to the ED than ever before, and these numbers will continue to grow in the

future.

Now, when I was in medical school, I vaguely remember learning the complex

physiology and long lists of congenital heart diseases, which I've now all but forgotten.

And since, I've figured out that while understanding the physiology is important, what we really

want to know is what actions to take in the ED when we have a cyanotic

or shocky baby in front of us in the resuscitation room.

So with that goal in mind of learning a practical approach to congenital heart disease emergencies

using the child's age, color, and a few simple tests, Dr. Strobel and Dr. Schrobel and Dr. Jouber will discuss some key actions,

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