PARENTS’ PREFERRED CHILD HEALTH INFORMATION SOURCES: IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING PRACTICE

Abstract

Aim: To ascertain parents’ preferences in sources of health information concerning their children’s general health care needs, and caring for their children when they are sick. Design: Exploratory/descriptive design. A telephone survey secured data for the study and qualitative content analysis and descriptive statistics were used for analysis. Setting & Participants: Part 2 of a larger study in which Part 1 evaluated parents’ satisfaction with a paediatric telephone triage service. One hundred of the 101 parents who were recruited for Part 1 of the study participated in Part 2, an examination of parents’ preferences in information sources relating to their child’s health. Main Outcome Measures: Parents’ preferences in child health information sources varied according to the perceived severity of their child’s illness. Results: Parents frequently selected more than one item on a list of health information sources provided. In a nonurgent situation when children were sick a total of 170 selections were made by parents, with ‘telephone advice line’ the source most frequently selected (58, 34%), followed by general practitioner (27, 15.8%). In an emergency situation the most frequently selected information source was again ‘telephone advice line’ (74, n=129, 57.4%), followed by ‘other’ (31, n=129, 24.3%) often identified as relating to dialing ‘000’ (Australia’s emergency services number). Finally, when parents required information about the general health care needs of their child, ‘other’ (most frequently identified as books) was selected on 40 (n=185, 21.6%) occasions, followed by child health clinic (35, n= 185, 18.9%). Conclusion: Parents prefer to receive information about the health care needs of their child from another person rather than a printed or audio-visual source.