NCT02277899

Primary Care, Communication, and Improving Children's Health

• Status: Completed
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 100 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 6 Years – 12 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

The purpose of this study is to determine communication content and strategies in primary care that predict improvement in weight status among overweight school-age children.

Detailed description

We will test whether 1) pediatrician-patient communication regarding overweight status, behavior/risk-factor counseling, and the frequency and time to next follow-up visit, compared with either no communication or incomplete communication (communicating only high weight status without behavior/risk-factor counseling or a follow-up visit) will predict improvement in weight status at one year follow-up, and 2) during pediatrician-patient communication regarding weight and weight management, higher patient-centeredness will predict improvement in weight status at one year follow-up. The communication content identified will generate new information about the most effective content and style of pediatrician-patient communication that predict weight-status improvement. Because we prospectively will examine clinical practice elements in the one-year interval between well-child visits, acknowledging that communication regarding high weight status may initiate assessment of risk factors for heart disease (such as high cholesterol and blood sugar), more frequent follow-up visits, or prompt a nutrition referral, we will generate novel information about the most effective clinical practices and follow-up interval and frequency that predict weight-status improvement in overweight children. We also will examine if the content and style of communication are related to improvements in diet and lifestyle behaviors at one-year follow-up.

Conditions

• Childhood Obesity
• Overweight
• Communication
• Weight Loss

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Communication regarding overweight status	Pediatrician-patient/parent communication regarding child's high weight status
OTHER	Risk-factor assessment and counseling	Counseling regarding cardiovascular risk factor assessments/results.
OTHER	Lifestyle behavior assessment and counseling	Counseling regarding diet and lifestyle changes to improve weight status.
OTHER	Interval follow-up to readdress weight	Interval follow-up to readdress weight, prior to the next well-child visit one year later. Follow-up could include ongoing care through nutrition and/or an intensive weight-management program.
OTHER	Patient-centered communication	Patient-centered communication will be scored as the ratio of patient to doctor-centered communication regarding weight topics. Means will be calculated for total and weight-communication-specific pediatrician, child, and parent-talk time, and patient, doctor, and the ratio of patient/doctor-centered communication scores. For the primary hypothesis, biomedical information-giving (for example, risk-factor communication) will be treated as patient-centered because the principal investigator's focus groups suggest that parents want this information, and prior research suggests that including biomedical-information giving improves the correlation of Roter's patient-centeredness measure with patient health status and satisfaction scores.

Timeline

• Start date: 2014-10-14
• Primary completion: 2016-08-05
• Completion: 2017-08-10
• First posted: 2014-10-29
• Last updated: 2020-05-19

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States