Establishing priorities in child health: Giving parents and youth a voice.
Sarah A Elliott, Shannon D Scott, Kelsey S Wright and 1 others
PMID 37842797WHAT IT FOUND
Parents and youth in Alberta named mental health, vaccines, access to care, and behaviour and development topics as child health research priorities.
Parents prioritized screen time and neurodevelopment; youth prioritized early anxiety and depression signs.
Key findings
01Parents and youth rated mental health, quality of health care, and vaccines as high-priority child health topics; parents also rated behaviour, learning, and developmental disorders as high priority.
02Parents' top research question was the effect of screen time on cognition and neurodevelopment; youth's top question was early signs of anxiety and depression and when to seek help.
03Focus group themes included parents' needs for vaccination reminders, mental health information, credible health information, and support for behaviour and development; youth's themes included access, wait times, self-advocacy, sexual health, and peer mental health.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Participants were recruited through convenience and snowball sampling, so people who chose to respond may not represent all parents and youth. Most participants were white, female, born in Canada, well-educated, and living in urban areas, so priorities may not reflect rural, Indigenous, or other ethnic and cultural groups. The study was done online during the pandemic, so people without English, internet, or a device were excluded. Only 12 parents and 21 youth took part in focus groups, and only 99 completed the second questionnaire, so the final ranking reflects a smaller group than those enrolled. The paper does not show whether these priorities changed funding or practice.
Declared interests
No conflicts were declared. Funding came from the Stollery Children's Hospital Foundation and the Alberta Women's Health Foundation through the Women and Children's Health Research Institute Innovation Grant (2550) awarded to Dr. Scott. The funder had no role in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation of data, writing of the report, or decision to submit the manuscript for publication. Dr. Hartling and Dr. Scott are Distinguished Researchers with the Stollery Science Lab supported by the Stollery Children's Hospital Foundation.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the screen time question as proof that screen time harms cognition. It is the top research priority parents wanted answered, not a tested outcome.