Journal article
Accuracy of parents’ subjective assessment of paediatric fever with thermometer measured fever in a primary care setting
- Abstract:
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Background
Fever is a common symptom of benign childhood illness but a high fever may be a sign of a serious infection. Temperature is often used by parents to check for illness in their children, and the presence of a high temperature can act as a prompt to consult a healthcare professional. It would be helpful for GPs to understand how well parental assessment of the presence of fever correlates with temperature measurement in the clinic in order to incorporate the history of the child’s fever into their clinical assessment.
Methods
Secondary analysis of a cross-sectional diagnostic method comparison study. Parents were asked whether they thought their child had fever before their temperature was measured by a researcher. Fever was defined as a temperature of 38 °C and higher using either an axillary or tympanic thermometer.
Results
Of 399 children recruited, 119 (29.8%) were believed by their parents to be febrile at the time of questioning and 23 (6.3%) had a fever as measured by a researcher in the clinic. 23.5% of children with a parental assessment of fever were found to have a fever in the clinic. Less than 1% of children whose parents thought they did not have a fever were found to be febrile in the clinic. Having more than one child did not improve accuracy of parents assessing fever in their child.
Conclusions
In the GP surgery setting, a child identified as afebrile by their parent is highly likely to be measured as such in the clinic. A child identified as febrile by their parent is less likely to be measured as febrile.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 696.3KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/s12875-022-01638-6
Authors
- Publisher:
- BioMed Central
- Journal:
- BMC Primary Care More from this journal
- Volume:
- 23
- Article number:
- 30
- Publication date:
- 2022-02-21
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-01-18
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1471-2296
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1237459
- Local pid:
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pubs:1237459
- Deposit date:
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2022-02-04
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Edwards et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- ©2022 The Author(s). Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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