Delivering Health Education to Children With Chronic Conditions: A Scoping Review and Evidence and Gap Map.

Only sixteen studies said anything about adapting education for children with diverse needs, and most of those focused on autism and cognition; several autism studies went further and excluded children with intellectual disability, hearing or vision impairment or physical disability. Outcome measurement relied on study-specific surveys, questionnaires and interviews with little consistency, so the results of different studies cannot be compared or combined. No included study looked at whether a programme lasted once the study ended, and only four reported cost or penetration, so there is no information on whether any of these approaches is affordable or sustainable in routine practice. Some studies described the educational method only briefly, so approaches such as active, hands-on learning may have been used without being identified. The review did not examine equity beyond disability accessibility, for example rural or remote families or culturally and linguistically diverse populations. This is a map of what has been studied and how, not a test of what works; nothing in it shows that any delivery method improves children's knowledge, behaviour or health.

Funded by the University of Adelaide through a Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences Early Career Grant. No commercial sponsor is named and no competing interests are declared in the text supplied. An artificial intelligence tool (Elicit) was used only as an optional crosscheck of extracted data and none of its output was analysed or reported.

The wrong conclusion is that these delivery methods work. The review mapped what has been studied and how, it did not test or compare programmes and did not combine their results, and outcome measures were mostly study-specific questionnaires and interviews that differed from study to study. Peer-led learning and digital agents appear in the paper as suggestions for future development, not as tested approaches.