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 Including children in these kinds of post-treatment surveys isn’t
typical, but it also isn’t difficult and could help doctors
understand how to better serve their patients under age 18, the
study team writes in Archives of Disease in Childhood.
“It’s increasingly recognized that the best healthcare is based on a
partnership between health professionals, patients and their
families,” said lead study author Dr. Dougal Hargreaves of the
University College London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child
Health.
“Achieving this goal depends on listening to patients and their
families in order to understand what matters most to them and to
improve their experience of healthcare,” he told Reuters Health by
email.
Hargreaves and colleagues analyzed more than 6,200 surveys given in
National Health Service hospitals in 2014 regarding the experiences
of patients between ages 8 and 15. The surveys contained two
sections, one for parents and one that could be completed by young
patients themselves, by parents or jointly.
Nearly 60 percent of the patients completed the youth section of the
survey themselves, and 28 percent responded jointly with their
parents.
Parents and their children tended to agree on the quality of pain
relief the child received and the quality of the overall experience,
the researchers found. However, they tended to disagree on questions
about the quality of communication with hospital staff, involvement
in decision-making, feeling safe and having adequate privacy.
“A bad experience with a doctor or dentist as a young child may be
remembered for decades and may put people off seeking care when they
need it,” Hargreaves said.
“For young people with a long-term condition like diabetes or
epilepsy, their long-term outcomes can be affected by attitudes and
habits they picked up when they first learned to manage their
condition as a teenager,” he added.
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The study authors suggest including children over age 8 in patient
surveys, as long as the wording is adapted and questionnaires are
designed appropriately for pediatric patients. Hargreaves and
colleagues are working on tools to share decision-making between
children and parents and to develop what they call “child/young
person-friendly” versions of patient experience surveys for
different healthcare settings.
“Being in the hospital can be an unpleasant and frightening
experience for a child,” Hargreaves said. “Listening to them shows
that the way they feel is important to us, and it allows us to help
them through their hospital experience.”
In a 2013 research review, Dr. Anne-Emmanuelle Ambresin of Lausanne
University Hospital in Switzerland and colleagues outlined several
ways to make surveys and healthcare more friendly for youth. They
identified eight areas that are central to a young person’s positive
experience of care, including accessibility, staff attitude,
communication, medical competency, guideline-driven care, age
appropriate environments, involvement in decision-making and health
outcomes.
“Staff attitudes, which included the notions of respect and
friendliness, appeared universally applicable,” said Ambresin, who
was not involved in the current study.
“Other domains, such as an appropriate environment, including
cleanliness, were more specific to particular contexts,” she added.
“Measures of youth-friendly healthcare should address these.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2FIgZBx Archives of Disease in Childhood,
online February 6, 2018.
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