Improving post-concussion discharge education for families seeking emergency department care: intervention development

ABSTRACT

Background

Pediatric emergency departments (ED) are where many families receive post-concussion medical care and thus an important context for helping parents build skills to support their child after discharge.

Objective

Develop a strategy for increasing parent provision of emotional and instrumental support to their child after discharge and conduct a pilot test of this strategy’s acceptability.

Methods

In a large pediatric ED in the United States, we partnered with parents (n = 15) and clinicians (n = 15) to understand needs and constraints related to discharge education and to operationalize a strategy to feasibly address these needs. This produced a brief daily text message intervention for parents for 10 days post-discharge. We used a sequential cohort design to assess the acceptability this intervention and its efficacy in changing parenting practices in the 2-weeks post-discharge (n = 98 parents).

Results

Parents who received the messaging intervention rated it as highly acceptable and had meaningfully higher scores for emotionally supportive communication with their child in the two weeks post-discharge than parents in the control condition (Cohen’s d = 0.65, p = 0.021).

Conclusions

This brief messaging intervention is a promising strategy for enhancing discharge education post-concussion that warrants further evaluation.

KEYWORDS:

• discharge
• calvert
• concussion
• education
• recovery

Disclosure statement

No authors have conflicts of interest to report.

Pre-registration

This study was preregistered on Clinicaltrials.gov (NCT04112914), 10/2/2019.

Author contribution statement

Emily Kroshus: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, writing and editing- original draft, funding acquisition. Mary Kathleen Steiner: conceptualization, resources, investigation, data curation, formal analysis, writing- review & editing, visualization, project administration. Sara Chrisman: conceptualization, writing- review & editing. Casey Lion: conceptualization, writing- review & editing. Frederick Rivara: conceptualization, writing- review & editing, supervision. Sarah Lowry: conceptualization, methodology, validation, supervision, writing- editing. Bonnie Strelitz: investigation, resources, writing- review & editing. Eileen Klein: conceptualization, writing- review & editing, supervision.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02699052.2024.2318595

Additional information

Funding

This study received funding from NINDS (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke) [R21NS111065].