Capturing Children's Voices in Healthcare: Development of the PREM-Ped Questionnaire

Area of Science:

• Pediatric healthcare quality improvement
• Patient experience measurement
• Child health services research

Background:

• Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) are crucial for assessing healthcare quality, especially in pediatrics.
• PREMs are less developed for children compared to patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs).
• Capturing children's healthcare experiences is vital for upholding their right to be heard.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the development of PREM-Ped, a questionnaire for children's healthcare experiences.
• To conduct an initial psychometric evaluation of the PREM-Ped questionnaire.
• To create a child-friendly tool for assessing paediatric care quality.

Main Methods:

• PREM-Ped was developed through a participatory process, including focus groups with children and cognitive interviews.
• A pilot study involved 586 children aged 4-15 years completing the PREM-Ped in a Swedish hospital.
• Psychometric properties were evaluated using a Rasch measurement model, and validity was assessed by comparing acute and elective care experiences.

Main Results:

• A short, comprehensible, and child-friendly questionnaire (PREM-Ped) was successfully developed.
• Initial psychometric evaluation indicated satisfactory measurement properties for the questionnaire.
• PREM-Ped demonstrated validity by differentiating between experiences in acute and elective care settings.

Conclusions:

• PREM-Ped is a valuable tool for measuring children's healthcare experiences.
• The questionnaire supports systematic, child-centred quality improvement initiatives.
• PREM-Ped can be utilized for benchmarking paediatric healthcare quality.