Effects of therapeutic play on children undergoing cast-removal procedures: a randomised controlled trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To examine (1) the effectiveness of therapeutic play in reducing anxiety and negative emotional manifestations among children undergoing cast-removal procedures and (2) the satisfaction of parents and cast technicians with cast-removal procedures. DESIGN: A randomised controlled trial. SETTING: An orthopaedic outpatient department of a regional teaching hospital in Hong Kong. PARTICIPANTS: Children (n=208) aged 3-12 undergoing cast-removal procedure were invited to participate. INTERVENTIONS: Eligible children were randomly allocated to either the intervention (n=103) or control group (n=105) and stratified by the two age groups (3-7 and 8-12 years). The intervention group received therapeutic play intervention, whereas the control group received standard care only. Participants were assessed on three occasions: before, during and after completion of the cast-removal procedure. OUTCOME MEASURES: Children's anxiety level, emotional manifestation and heart rate. The satisfaction ratings of parents and cast technicians with respect to therapeutic play intervention were also examined. RESULTS: Findings suggested that therapeutic play assists children aged 3-7 to reduce anxiety levels with mean differences between the intervention and control group was -20.1 (95% CI -35.3 to -4.9; p=0.01). Overall, children (aged 3-7 and 8-12) in the intervention groups exhibited fewer negative emotional manifestations than the control group with a mean score difference -2.2 (95% CI -3.1 to -1.4; p<0.001). Parents and technicians in the intervention group also reported a higher level of satisfaction with the procedures than the control group with a mean score difference of 4.0 (95% CI -5.6 to 2.3; p<0.001) and 2.6 (95% CI 3.7 to 1.6; p<0.001), respectively. CONCLUSION: Therapeutic play effectively reduces anxiety and negative emotional manifestations among children undergoing cast-removal procedures. The findings highlight the importance of integrating therapeutic play into standard care, in particular for children in younger age. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: ChiCTR-IOR-15006822; Pre-results.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".