[Respect for the interests of pediatric patients]

Physicians face situations involving ethical values. In the absence of instruments for exploring ethical issues in pediatric practice we developed a questionnaire (PEIPP: acronym in Spanish of implicit ethical principles in pediatric practice) to identify whether pediatricians show respect to the attributions of patients. PEIPP was validated by iterative evaluation by experts: a Kuder Richardson's coefficient of 0.98 and a concordance mean index of 0.80 were obtained. PEIPP included two kinds of vignettes: three vignettes exploring how physicians provide information to patients, and seven of how pediatricians make decisions in some specific circumstances. Five groups of pediatric residents (n = 53) and three groups of pediatricians (n = 76) in three hospitals participated. Globally there were no differences between residents and staff. In the vignettes exploring actions, there was a large variability in the answers whereas in the vignettes of information there was a general tendency to select the options indicating a respectful attitude. There was no correlation in the respectfulness between the two types of vignettes, nor between respectfulness and years of experience of the pediatricians. Less than 10% of residents and pediatricians showed a high consistency in answers indicating respectfulness. We conclude that a respectful attitude is not common in the group of physicians studied.