All about Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) Certification Course

Pediatric advanced life support (PALS) is a two day certification course developed by American Heart Association. The course is designed for healthcare providers and teaches them how to identify, analyze and treat critical medical problems in children and infants.

 

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PALS certification is strongly required in such medical settings where children are exposed to surgical units. The medical skills taught to students during class increases the survival rate of children and infants, who have just faced a cardiopulmonary arrest as well as prevent the arrest from occurring again.

Main goals of the course:

After successfully completing Pals certification San Diego, the participant is expected to demonstrate the following skills efficiently:

·         Identify if a child or infant is at the risk of facing a cardiopulmonary arrest.

·         Recognize symptoms of shock and respiratory failure in child or infant.

·         Able to define an approach to prevent pediatric cardiopulmonary arrest.

·         Able to recover child or infant from medical emergencies like shock, respiratory failure, cardiopulmonary arrest, etc.

Any healthcare provider looking forward to acquire this certification needs to register for the course. The course generally consists of three main steps -

1. Self-Study

You will be given textbooks, handouts or online reading materials before beginning with the actual classes. Most of the instructors will want you to study the reading materials provided at least a month before the classes start.

The reading materials provided will act as a base of the lessons which you are about to learn at classes. The classes will be conducted in hospitals or similar settings.  The course will cover factual data of diagnoses of critical problems identified in children. Thoroughly studying the material provided will help you in understanding the essential points of the course better.

2. Classroom teaching

Most of the PALS course will have two days classroom teaching. This life session intends on putting the students in different medical emergencies which may take place.

Each scenario will test your medical knowledge and skills to manage the situation. Certainly, the scenarios will vary, but mostly will include infant resuscitation. Also, throughout the classes you will be given enough knowledge to identify different equipments as well as recognize different normal and abnormal conditions in children or infants. 

3. Examinations

After completing the classroom teaching, the last and final step is appearing for examination. In the examination, you will be presented with different scenarios and based on these you have to give answers. The test paper will have 50 questions and you need to answer 80 percent of those questions correctly in order to clear the examination.

In addition to the basic test, most the medical institutions and employers will ask you to appear for clinical tests. In a clinical test, the participant will have to demonstrate understanding of the concepts of the course in a live setting. 

Necessity of recertification:

The certification which you receive on the completion of PALS course comes with a validity of 2 years. With every passing day there are new information and understanding achieved in the medical field and hence it is crucial for healthcare providers to appear for recertification. The recertification classes are similar to the initial classes.