I don't call it "gut feeling" - I call it experience. The great advantage we have as GPs (which our hospital colleagues don't have) is that we often know our patients inside out and can tell when something is "not right". As far as children are concerned we are right to be over cautious - they are often less informative than adults, better at "compensating" when seriously ill and so on.

However, what reassures me about this paper is that GPs diagnosing a child as non-serious infection are getting it right 99.8% of the time. Show me any other system that depends on human judgement that is less fallible than that.

Competing interests: None declared