Achieving closure through disclosure: experience in a pediatric institution.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Christine Harrison.
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OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to discover what the family doctors who attended an annual refresher course wished to obtain from participating in the event and what their response was to evidence that doctor behaviour is not changed by such programmes. DESIGN: The study used the qualitative method of in-depth interviews. SETTING: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and the surrounding area. PARTICIPANTS: The informants for the study were a sample of 6 family doctors who attended the 50th Annual Refresher Course for Family Physicians, held in April 2001 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. METHOD: In-depth interviews with the participants were conducted before and after they attended the annual refresher course. The doctors had pre-registered for the 3-day course. They were purposely selected to obtain diversity of gender, year of graduation from medical school and practice location. RESULTS: The doctors interviewed had 3 main reasons for attending the refresher course: to obtain information or to be updated; to be reassured that their practice behaviour was within accepted guidelines, and to hear from and interact with the specialists who gave presentations. All the participants in the study were able to name changes they had made as the result of attending a similar type of programme in the past and were sceptical of findings that practice behaviour did not change as a result of traditional continuing medical education (CME). CONCLUSIONS: Despite current support for interactive and practice-linked educational activities, the doctors in this study valued the input of the experts who lectured at the course. These doctors were not prepared to accept the currently held precept that their behaviour did not change as a result of attendance at traditional CME programmes.
OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine the relative roles of demographic, child behavioral, and parental characteristics in understanding the psychological distress suffered by parents of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It was hypothesized that a combination of child and parent demographics, severity of child behavioral disturbance, low knowledge of ADHD, causal and controllability attributions internal to the child, along with lower perceived parental control, would be associated with more severe psychological distress, as measured by parenting stress and depression. METHOD: One hundred mothers were interviewed and provided ratings of behavioral disturbance, severity of ADHD, knowledge of ADHD, attributions of cause and controllability of ADHD-related behaviors, parenting stress and depression. RESULTS: Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that the combination of these variables was significantly associated with parental psychological distress, accounting for 24% and 21% of the variance in parenting stress and depression, respectively. Unique contributions were evident for severity of behavioral disturbance and perceived parental control over child behaviors. Child's age, gender, medication status, and maternal education were controlled in the analyses. CONCLUSION: Results support the view that interventions for ADHD aimed only at child behavior are unlikely to alter long-term outcome.
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