What Do Patients and Families Want From a Child Neurology Consultation?

Understanding what patients and their parents want is essential to plan appropriate patient-centered care. Questionnaires were distributed to 500 consecutive children and parents seen for their first pediatric neurology consultation. Both patients and their families answered questions about their expectations of the consultation, their level of worry, and the Penn State Worry Questionnaire. The 5 most important issues for the parents were to get information, to work with the doctor to manage the problem, to have questions answered, to find out what was wrong, and to discuss the impact on the child’s life. The children had very similar priorities. The 5 least important concerns for parents were to get a prescription, blood tests, to talk to others with similar problems, to get a radiograph/computed tomography/magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and to be told nothing is wrong. The pediatric neurologists did well in anticipating these priorities but had more difficulty appreciating parent and patient level of worry.