Can we trust what parents tell us? A systematic review

Taking a history is a key diagnostic instrument in paediatric consultations. Numerous issues potentially reduce the history's reliability. Therefore, paediatricians have always expressed ambivalence regarding history taking from parents, both valuing and distrusting it. In this review, we describe how parents build and present a description of their child's health issues in the conceptual framework of self-regulation theory. We performed a systematic review on the literature on the reliability of history taking. No studies examined the reliability of history taking from parents, but there is a considerable body of evidence on the issue of mutual trust in relationships between health care professionals and patients. Because trust is a dynamic relational phenomenon, taking a patient centred approach in consultations is likely to increase the patients' and parents' trust in the health care professional, and their willingness to follow the health care professional's treatment proposals. We provide evidence based recommendations on how to build and maintain trust in paediatric consultations by taking a patient centred approach in such consultations.