INFORMATION NEEDS OF PARENTS OF HOSPITALIZED
CHILDREN
Liu Ke
School of
Nursing, Sun Yat-sen University of Medical Sciences, Guangzhou, China
Objective: The descriptive
comparative study was conducted to describe the information needs of
parents of hospitalized children, and compare the difference of information
needs among parents of hospitalized children with different age and
different types of illness.
Methods: The
quota sample consisted of 108 parents whose children were admitted to the
three Teaching Hospitals of Sun Yat-sen University of Medical Sciences. The inventory of
information needs of parents of hospitalized children was used to collect
data, which consists of 19 dichotomous questions relating to information
needs of parents of hospitalized children. Panel of experts tested the
validity of the instrument and Content Validity Index score was .79. The
reliability of the instrument was tested from which the KR-20 score was
.91. The parental information needs were analyzed using percentage,
frequency, means and standard
deviation, then t-test and one-way ANOVA was use to see if there
was any significant difference among parents whose children belong to
different age groups and types of illness.
Results: In the
information needs, need to know the cause of the disease, need to know the
treatment the child received and need to know the results of the
investigations were the most frequently identified by parents of
hospitalized children (98.1%); Need to receive an introduction about the
environment of the ward and the hospital was the least frequently
identified by parents (63.9%) Eleven items (57.9%) out of 19 items of
information need have more than 90% parents identified. The means of information needs among five
age groups were found to be significantly different (F=5.27,P=0.0007).
Parents of toddlers had the highest score of needs (mean=17.64, SD=2.48),
followed by parents of pre-school age children (mean=17.05, SD=3.02),
infants (mean=16.96, SD=2.90), school age children (mean=16.52, SD=3.67)
and adolescents (mean=13.41, SD=3.66). Further analysis using the Scheffe's
test identified that needs of parents of adolescents was significantly
lower than parents of other groups. Whereas the difference between other
pair of groups was not significant. Result of the study also indicated that
parents of chronically ill children had the higher need score (mean=17.20,
SD=2.97) than parents of acutely ill children (mean=15.73, SD=3.63), and
there was significantly different on them (t value=2.29, P=0.024).
Conclusions: Based on the
findings of the study, the following conclusions are made.
1. The level
of parental information needs was high.
2. The means
of score of information needs were different among parents whose
hospitalized children belonged to different age groups (p<0.05). The
score of information needs of parents of adolescents was lower than parents
of infants, toddlers, per-school age children and school age children.
3. The
information needs of parents of chronically ill children were significantly
higher than parents of acutely ill children at the level of .05.