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 The difference appears to stem in part from “family circumstances,”
such as an inability to get time off from work to be with the child
at the hospital, that more often affect non-white parents, according
to findings presented January 22 at the Society of Critical Care’s
annual conference in Honolulu, Hawaii.
“Disparities in research participation may compromise the
generalizability and validity of study findings,” lead author Dr.
Joanne Natale, a pediatrics professor at the University of
California, Davis told Reuters Health by email.
A lack of information on this topic also compromises researchers’
ability to analyze and address the problem, Natale added. “We
strongly recommend implementation of standards that would make data
regarding research consent and participation in racial and ethnic
subgroups routinely available,” she said.
The researchers sought permission from parents for 2,933 children to
participate in a critical care trial. It spanned 31 pediatric
intensive care units across the country and examined an algorithm
for nurses to use in managing sedation for children on mechanical
ventilation.
Of the nearly 3,000 children eligible for the trial, 2,278 (78
percent) received parental permission to participate.
White parents consented at a rate of 82.2 percent, compared to 74.1
percent of Hispanic parents and 71.5 percent of black parents.
Family circumstances made black families ineligible to be offered
consent to participate in the trial more often than Hispanic or
white families. For example, a parent or guardian could not be at
the child’s bedside because they were at work or lacked the
resources to travel the sometimes-long distances to the hospital. Or
the children were in foster care or wards of the state.
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And even among parents who were offered the choice to join, black
parents were more than 50 percent less likely than white parents to
let their children participate in the trial, and Hispanic parents
were 28 percent less likely to participate.
More parents agreed to join when they were allowed to participate in
the control rather than the intervention arm, however, and that held
true for all the parents in the study.
One explanation for some of the difference in participation rates
may be greater distrust of the medical community among people in
black and Hispanic communities, said Dr. James Chamberlain, division
chief of emergency medicine at Children’s National Health System in
Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the research.
“Future efforts to reduce these disparities should focus on
coordinating with families' schedules to improve approach rates, and
performing qualitative work with patient and family groups to
determine optimal ways to communicate information about medical
research,” Chamberlain told Reuters Health.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2kNhnnk Society of Critical Care Medicine
2017.
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