While doing a discharge check on a 3 day old baby, a paediatric SHO notices mild jaundice and prepares to perform a serum bilirubin estimation (SBR). She explains this to the mother, who breaks into tears and asks the SHO if there was any way she could check the level of jaundice without doing a blood test. The SHO discusses this with the neonatal consultant who mentions “We used to have a transcutaneous bilirubinometer when I was an SHO, but we stopped using it because it was inaccurate”.

A more sympathetic registrar gives you a recent review article¹ on jaundice which indicates that the older generation bilirubinometers were shown to be inaccurate for clinical …