Q. JRCALC’s “Page-for-age” provides normal physiological paediatric parameters; how is this referenced?
A. NLS/APLS/Resus Council (UK) reference data have been our historical reference sources throughout our guidelines, and they are accepted throughout the neonatal and paediatric communities as the definitive reference for neonatal and paediatric practice.
There will always be different published “normal” ranges from those that we adopt, reflecting differences in the respective author’s intent, e.g. an early warning score may deliberately chose to set a higher or lower trigger value as their cut off criteria (as part of a scoring system), which may or may not reflect what NLS/APLS/RC(UK) define as “normal”. At the upper and lower extents of any “normal(ly)” distributed range of physiological values, there will be, for example, heart rates that would be accepted as “normal” under certain physiological circumstances (e.g. sleeping) that would be defined differently as “abnormal” in different clinical contexts; this overlap between “normal” and “abnormal” values partly explains why we see such differences in differently sourced tables of “normality”.
There will always be different published “normal” ranges from those that we adopt, reflecting differences in the respective author’s intent, e.g. an early warning score may deliberately chose to set a higher or lower trigger value as their cut off criteria (as part of a scoring system), which may or may not reflect what NLS/APLS/RC(UK) define as “normal”. At the upper and lower extents of any “normal(ly)” distributed range of physiological values, there will be, for example, heart rates that would be accepted as “normal” under certain physiological circumstances (e.g. sleeping) that would be defined differently as “abnormal” in different clinical contexts; this overlap between “normal” and “abnormal” values partly explains why we see such differences in differently sourced tables of “normality”.
Date Posted: 2026-06-08