Key Concepts
Introduction
Gastrointestinal complaints are among the most common reasons families seek pediatric care. Vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, abdominal pain, and feeding difficulties are encountered by RPNs across all pediatric settings โ from newborn nurseries to school-age clinics. The challenge is that many of these presentations look similar at first glance, yet some represent benign developmental variants and others are life-threatening surgical emergencies requiring intervention within hours. The newborn who vomits green bile is not merely having a 'spitting up' episode โ it is a surgical emergency until malrotation with volvulus is excluded. The 6-week-old boy who vomits every feed forcefully and is still hungry is not colicky โ he has pyloric stenosis. The toddler who screams with abdominal pain and then goes quiet is not merely having a tantrum โ the quiet period may represent the child's exhaustion between intussusception pain waves. This lesson covers the systematic approach to pediatric GI assessment, key developmental variations in stool and feeding patterns, and the clinical presentations of the most important pediatric GI emergencies. These are high-yield topics for the REx-PN examination and essential for...