Cross-sectional study of parental knowledge, behaviour and anxiety in management of paediatric fever among German parents

OBJECTIVES: Fever is a common symptom among children. Parental lack of knowledge about fever could cause anxiety and lead to unnecessary measures to subside fever. There is little evidence about German parents’ knowledge and their fever management. DESIGN: A cross-sectional study using a paper-based questionnaire. SETTING: 16 kindergartens in Saarbrücken and Saarlouis regional association accepted to participate in the study. Parents from these kindergartens were requested during the pickup time to answer the questionnaire. PARTICIPANTS: 481 German parents participated in the study, 394 of them were women. Inclusion criteria were good understanding of German and being a parent of at least one child below the age of 7 years. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: Knowledge and behaviour of parents on paediatric fever management and the factors influencing fever anxiety. RESULTS: The older the parents were, the more anxiety they reported. Their definition of fever had a wide range of 30°C–41°C (mean 38.46, SD=0.67) and almost 90% (mean 3.05, SD=2.03) of participants reported fever as useful, whereby they felt more confident the more they found fever useful. 69% of parents felt calm when their child has fever (mean 4.47, SD=2.27). In case of fever, 55% of parents administer paracetamol, 72% ibuprofen and 32% of them would alternate between the two. Paracetamol and ibuprofen are used more by more anxious parents. In explorative factor analysis, reasons to reduce temperature were summarised in three main factors: damage prevention, illness control and well-being protection, whereby the first two were positively related to parental anxiety. CONCLUSIONS: Both knowledge as well as level of confidence/anxiety vary largely. Taking antipyretics is related to higher level of anxiety, indicating the need for further education. Fever anxiety depends on multiple factors, which have to be further investigated.