Exploring parents’ perceptions on the importance and feasibility of child-centred consultations of 5-11 year olds in general practice

ABSTRACT

Background

The active involvement of children in their health care has been shown to increase compliance and improve outcomes. Despite this, children in the 6–12 year group have little meaningful involvement in General Practitioner (GP) consultations, contributing to less than 20% of interactions.

Aim

To explore parents’ perceptions on the importance and feasibility of child-centred consultations.

Methods

Purposive sampling was used to recruit parents from a primary school in London. Three audio recorded focus groups were conducted, transcribed verbatim, and subsequently thematically analysed.

Results

While most parents acknowledged the importance of child-centred consultations, they legitimately questioned their child’s ability to make decisions. Parents attributed low child participation to several factors including the perceived approachability of the GP, whether their child had met the doctor before, their child’s personality and the general lack of time during consultations. Parents described their own anxiety and worries surrounding their child’s health care which lead to their role as their child’s advocate, decision maker and protector during GP consultations.

Conclusion

This study confirms the importance of child-centred consultations and highlights numerous barriers which need to be overcome to achieve greater child involvement in consultations. If the findings were to be replicated in future larger studies, then it could lead to changes in both training and, crucially, how child-parent-doctor consultations should be carried out in general practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Paediatric primary care
• child-centred consultations
• triadic communication
• general practice
• doctor/parent/child consultations

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the Research Department of Primary Care and Population Health and all the focus group participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical consent

This study was approved by the UCL Research Ethics Committee on the 22^nd of January 2019 with approval validity until the 31^st of January 2020 and was registered with the Data Protection Office under reference No Z6364106/2019/01/46.