Pet therapy in the emergency department and ambulatory care: A systematic review and meta‐analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Pet therapy, or animal‐assisted interventions (AAIs), has demonstrated positive effects for patients, families, and health care providers (HCPs) in inpatient settings. However, the evidence supporting AAIs in emergency or ambulatory care settings is unclear. We conducted a systematic review to evaluate the effectiveness of AAIs on patient, family, and HCP experience in these settings. Methods We searched (from inception to May 2020) Medline, Embase, Cochrane CENTRAL, PsycINFO, and CINAHL, plus gray literature, for studies assessing AAIs in emergency and ambulatory care settings on: (1) patient and family anxiety/distress or pain and (2) HCP stress. Screening, data extraction, and quality assessment were done in duplicate with conflicts adjudicated by a third party. Random‐effects meta‐analyses are reported as mean differences (MDs) or standardized mean differences (SMDs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs), as appropriate. Results We included nine randomized controlled trials (RCTs; 341 patients, 146 HCPs, 122 child caregivers), four before–after (83 patients), and one mixed‐method study (124 patients). There was no effect across three RCTs measuring patient‐reported anxiety/distress ( n = 380; SMD = –0.36, 95% CI = –0.95 to 0.23, I 2 = 81%), while two before–after studies suggested a benefit ( n = 80; SMD = –1.95, 95% CI = –2.99 to –0.91, I 2 = 72%). Four RCTs found no difference in measures of observed anxiety/distress ( n = 166; SMD = –0.44, 95% CI = –1.01 to 0.13, I 2 = 73%) while one before–after study reported a significant benefit ( n = 60; SMD = –1.64, 95% CI = –2.23 to –1.05). Three RCTs found no difference in patient‐reported pain ( n = 202; MD = –0.90, 95% CI = –2.01 to 0.22, I 2 = 68%). Two RCTs reported positive but nonsignificant effects on HCP stress. Conclusions Limited evidence is available on the effectiveness of AAIs in emergency and ambulatory care settings. Rigorous studies using global experience‐oriented (or patient‐identified) outcome measures are required.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".