What matters when managing childhood fever in the emergency department? A discrete-choice experiment comparing the preferences of parents and healthcare professionals in the UK.

Simon Leigh ORCID logo; Jude Robinson; Shunmay Yeung ORCID logo; Frans Coenen; Enitan D Carrol; Louis W Niessen; (2020) What matters when managing childhood fever in the emergency department? A discrete-choice experiment comparing the preferences of parents and healthcare professionals in the UK. Archives of disease in childhood, 105 (8). pp. 765-771. ISSN 0003-9888 DOI: 10.1136/archdischild-2019-318209
Copy

BACKGROUND: Fever among children is a leading cause of emergency department (ED) attendance and a diagnostic conundrum; yet robust quantitative evidence regarding the preferences of parents and healthcare providers (HCPs) for managing fever is scarce. OBJECTIVE: To determine parental and HCP preferences for the management of paediatric febrile illness in the ED. SETTING: Ten children's centres and a children's ED in England from June 2018 to January 2019. PARTICIPANTS: 98 parents of children aged 0-11 years, and 99 HCPs took part. METHODS: Nine focus-groups and coin-ranking exercises were conducted with parents, and a discrete-choice experiment (DCE) was conducted with both parents and HCPs, which asked respondents to choose their preferred option of several hypothetical management scenarios for paediatric febrile illness, with differing levels of visit time, out-of-pocket costs, antibiotic prescribing, HCP grade and pain/discomfort from investigations. RESULTS: The mean focus-group size was 4.4 participants (range 3-7), with a mean duration of 27.4 min (range 18-46 min). Response rates to the DCE among parents and HCPs were 94.2% and 98.2%, respectively. Avoiding pain from diagnostics, receiving a faster diagnosis and minimising wait times were major concerns for both parents and HCPs, with parents willing-to-pay £16.89 for every 1 hour reduction in waiting times. Both groups preferred treatment by consultants and nurse practitioners to treatment by doctors in postgraduate training. Parents were willing to trade-off considerable increases in waiting times (24.1 min) to be seen by consultants and to avoid additional pain from diagnostics (45.6 min). Reducing antibiotic prescribing was important to HCPs but not parents. CONCLUSIONS: Both parents and HCPs care strongly about reducing visit time, avoiding pain from invasive investigations and receiving diagnostic insights faster when managing paediatric febrile illness. As such, overdue advances in diagnostic capabilities should improve child and carer experience and HCP satisfaction considerably in managing paediatric febrile illness.


picture_as_pdf
What matters when managing childhood fever.pdf
subject
Published Version
Available under Creative Commons: 3.0

View Download

Atom BibTeX OpenURL ContextObject in Span Multiline CSV OpenURL ContextObject Dublin Core Dublin Core MPEG-21 DIDL EndNote HTML Citation JSON MARC (ASCII) MARC (ISO 2709) METS MODS RDF+N3 RDF+N-Triples RDF+XML RIOXX2 XML Reference Manager Refer Simple Metadata ASCII Citation EP3 XML
Export

Downloads