What does 'PEWing or 'PEWsing mean? A new word in paediatrics

Since 2015, a national Paediatric Early Warning System (PEWS) has been used in acute paediatric settings in the Ireland. At a national PEWS workshop, the terms ‘pewing’ and ‘pewsing’ were noted to have been used or overheard in clinical conversations in some settings. We sought to understand the term ‘pewing’ or ‘pewsing’ interviewing 40 frontline paediatric nurses and doctors in a tertiary hospital and 20 from other regional sites. We asked, ‘what does the term ‘pewing’ or ‘pewsing’ mean to you?’ 95% (38/40) of staff asked at Children Hospital Ireland at Tallaght Hospital heard or used the term daily. No responses indicated the same understanding of the term. Nurses typically reported the term as indicating an abnormal observation, but with no consensus as to what the abnormality was; interpretations varied between PEWS scores of 1 and 7. Doctors echoed this, citing examples such as a ‘deterioration of a patient’...

from Archives of Disease in Childhood current issue https://ift.tt/3cqla3V