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Parent Experiences Caring for a Child With Bronchiolitis: A Qualitative Study
Alyson Campbell1, Lisa Hartling2, Samantha Louie-Poon1
1Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
Insights
Parents often lack knowledge about bronchiolitis symptoms and management. Providing evidence-based resources can help parents better care for children with this common respiratory infection.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric respiratory infections
- Parental health literacy
Background:
- Bronchiolitis significantly impacts children, families, and healthcare systems.
- Understanding parental experiences is key to addressing misconceptions and reducing the burden of bronchiolitis.
Purpose of the Study:
- To describe parents' experiences caring for a child diagnosed with bronchiolitis.
Main Methods:
- Qualitative description approach.
- Semi-structured interviews with 15 parents.
- Recruitment from a specialized pediatric emergency department.
Main Results:
- Identified five themes: symptom recognition, family impact, ED visit decisions, ED experience, and treatment/management.
- Parents demonstrated a general lack of awareness regarding bronchiolitis symptoms, treatment, and management.
- Bronchiolitis significantly affects children and the entire family unit.
Conclusions:
- Parents exhibit knowledge deficits in recognizing bronchiolitis symptom severity.
- Enhanced, evidence-based resources are needed to improve parental understanding of bronchiolitis.
Background:
Bronchiolitis is an acute lower respiratory infection, with significant impacts on children and families and strains on the health care system. Understanding parents' experiences and information needs caring for a child with bronchiolitis is crucial to highlight misconceptions or issues contributing to the high burden. The objective of this qualitative study was to describe parents' experiences caring for a child with bronchiolitis.
Methods:
Qualitative description guided this study. Participants were recruited from the Stollery Children's Hospital emergency department (ED), a specialized pediatric ED in a major Canadian urban center. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 parents.
Results:
Five major themes were identified: (a) their children's symptoms and behaviors, (b) bronchiolitis affects the entire family, (c) factors influencing parent's decision to go to ED, (d) ED experience for parents and their children, and (e) bronchiolitis treatment and management. Interviews revealed bronchiolitis has significant effects on both children and families and parents are generally unaware of bronchiolitis symptoms, treatment, and management.
Conclusions:
Our study highlights that parents have knowledge deficits when it comes to recognizing the presence and severity of bronchiolitis symptoms. Parents would benefit from having more evidence-based resources to enhance their knowledge about the nature of bronchiolitis.
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