title: Assessing physician-parent communication during emergency medical procedures in children: an observational study in a low-literacy Latino patient population.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Effective physician-patient communication is critical to the clinical decision-making process. We studied parental recall of information provided during an informed consent discussion process before performance of emergency medical procedures in a pediatric emergency department of an inner-city hospital with a large bilingual population.
  
  
  METHODS
  Fifty-five parent/child dyads undergoing emergency medical procedures were surveyed prospectively in English/Spanish postprocedure for recall of informed consent information. Exact logistic regression was used to predict the ability to name a risk, benefit, and alternative to the procedure based on a parent's language, education, and acculturation.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Among English-speaking parents, there tended to be higher proportions that could name a risk, benefit, or alternative. Our regression models showed overall that the parents with more than a high school education tended to have nearly 5 times higher odds of being able to name a risk.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  A gap in communication may exist between physicians and patients (or parents of patients) during the consent-taking process, and this gap may be impacted by socio-demographic factors such as language and education level.
authors: From the *Department of Scholarly Projects, University of Arizona College of Medicine; †Department of Pediatrics, Arizona Children's Center; and ‡Department of Research, Maricopa Integrated Health System, Phoenix, AZ.
authors: Aaron
authors: A
authors: Dahl
authors: Madhumita
authors: M
authors: Sinha
authors: David I
authors: DI
authors: Rosenberg
authors: Melissa
authors: M
authors: Tran
authors: André
authors: A
authors: Valdez
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003142:Communication; D003144:Communication Barriers; D032962:Consent Forms; D004636:Emergency Service, Hospital; D005260:Female; D057220:Health Literacy / Q000639:trends; D006630:Hispanic or Latino / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D016015:Logistic Models; D008297:Male; D008390:Markov Chains; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D016017:Odds Ratio; D010290:Parents; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D011368:Professional-Family Relations; D011446:Prospective Studies; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D055815:Young Adult