Evaluating communication with parents in paediatric patient encounters: a systematic review protocol

INTRODUCTION: Breaking bad news and dealing with difficult patient encounters is a skill that medical residents must learn during their curriculum. Many different tools are available to measure communication quality, but their development and validation processes are often missing. In this paper, we present the protocol of a systematic review aiming to identify the validated tools for measuring communication skills or communication effectiveness with parents in a paediatrics setting in general, including for difficult patient encounters. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We will conduct our systematic review in accordance with the methodology suggested by COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) and will report this paper following the guidelines of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses. We will include the studies in which authors developed and/or validated tools for assessing the quality of communication with families by residents and/or physicians during patient encounters in paediatric settings. Studies assessing communication in telemedicine and studies that use the tool to measure a different outcome than its validation will be excluded. Our search strategy will be developed by a scientific librarian and validated using the Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategy (PRESS) tool. Two reviewers will independently screen the studies for selection, extract data of the ones included and assess their level of risk of bias using the COSMIN Risk of Bias checklist. We will perform a narrative synthesis on the study selection process, the characteristics of studies and study population, the characteristics of tools identified, their process of development and/or validation and their psychometric properties. If sufficient data are available, we will do quantitative analyses for each psychometric property. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Approval from an ethics committee is not required, as there is no primary data collection. Our findings will be disseminated through a peer-reviewed publication and at local, national and international conferences. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42020151642.