Assessing physician-parent communication during emergency medical procedures in children: an observational study in a low-literacy Latino patient population.

OBJECTIVE

Effective physician-patient communication is critical to the clinical decision-making process. We studied parental recall of information provided during an informed consent discussion process before performance of emergency medical procedures in a pediatric emergency department of an inner-city hospital with a large bilingual population.

METHODS

Fifty-five parent/child dyads undergoing emergency medical procedures were surveyed prospectively in English/Spanish postprocedure for recall of informed consent information. Exact logistic regression was used to predict the ability to name a risk, benefit, and alternative to the procedure based on a parent's language, education, and acculturation.

RESULTS

Among English-speaking parents, there tended to be higher proportions that could name a risk, benefit, or alternative. Our regression models showed overall that the parents with more than a high school education tended to have nearly 5 times higher odds of being able to name a risk.

CONCLUSIONS

A gap in communication may exist between physicians and patients (or parents of patients) during the consent-taking process, and this gap may be impacted by socio-demographic factors such as language and education level.