Beliefs and Behaviours of Parents Regarding Antibiotic Use by Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To determine parents' beliefs and behaviours about antibiotic use by their children in the ambulatory setting. DESIGN: Cross-sectional survey, where a self-administered questionnaire was completed by adult caregivers of children before the medical assessment of the child. SETTING: Three paediatric acute care settings (paediatric emergency department [PED], group paediatric practice and after hours walk-in medical clinic). POPULATION STUDIED: Adult caregivers (n=114; 76% mothers, 19% fathers and 4% other caregivers) of children brought for acute care were surveyed. MAIN RESULTS: Forty-one caregivers completed the survey in the PED, 37 in the paediatric office and 36 in the walk-in clinic. They believed that antibiotics were appropriate for ear infections (86%), pharyngitis (77%), bronchitis (49%), sinus colds (20%), cough (12%), colds (8%) and influenza (8%). Sixty-eight per cent of children had received antibiotics in the previous year. Thirteen per cent of caregivers reported previously requesting an antibiotic for their child, 18% believed a previous antibiotic prescription had been unnecessary and 19% had not complied with prescriptions in the past. Concerns about antibiotic use included antibiotic resistance (50%), harm to the immune system (40%), adverse effects (28%) and lack of efficacy (19%). CONCLUSIONS: In this population, parental knowledge and understanding of indications for antibiotics and their adverse effects were good; however, incorrect beliefs and disagreements with physicians did occur. To improve patterns of antibiotic use by children, it will be necessary to understand parents' beliefs, behaviours and information sources better so that misconceptions and disagreements with caregivers can be addressed appropriately.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".