It’s changeover day, you’re on the special care baby unit for the first time ever, your registrar runs off to clinic, the folder of yellowing guidelines has several pages missing and the hospital website won’t let you onto gpnotebook.com. What you want is the paediatric equivalent of the “cheese-and-onion” (Oxford handbook of clinical medicine) to help steer you through the rapids of paediatrics.

Oxford University Press have finally come up with a handbook for paediatrics (they’ve got one for virtually everything else), targeted at junior doctors to help them through their “first steps” in the specialty. Other paediatric handbooks exist but often fall short. Some omit neonatology, some are too complex (and heavy), and others don’t have proper management plans or useful drug doses. But in what is one of …