The Nature of Family Engagement in Interventions for Children With Chronic Conditions.
Kathleen A Knafl, Nancy L Havill, Jennifer Leeman and 3 others
PMID 27596106WHAT IT FOUND
Across 70 randomized family-focused interventions, most (79%) were psychoeducational and 76% targeted parents' regimen-management capacity; only 21% addressed family relationships.
This described engagement, not whether it improved child health.
Key findings
01Of the 70 interventions, 55 (79%) were predominantly psychoeducational and 15 (21%) also addressed family relationships or functioning.
02Most interventions (76%) engaged parents to build knowledge and skills for managing the treatment regimen and condition control or management.
03Only 11 (16%) interventions targeted supporting or changing parent role performance or family functioning.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
It reviewed published reports rather than testing patient outcomes, so it cannot show whether family engagement improved health or functioning. Only randomized trials were included, so intervention-development reports that might explain the rationale for family involvement were not analyzed. The coding depended on what authors wrote; developers were not contacted or asked to confirm categories. Asthma accounted for 53% of interventions, so the patterns may not apply to other chronic conditions. Study sizes varied widely, from 7 to 1014 participants, and family participants were sometimes unclear because some studies reported only number of families. For 51% of interventions, authors did not identify conceptual grounding or described only a general orientation.
Declared interests
The supplied text reports NIH-funded work (R01 NR012445) and does not include a competing-interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that family-focused interventions improve child health or that focusing on family relationships is better than teaching parents to manage the regimen. The paper described what 70 randomized interventions did, not whether they worked.