Access and Quality of Pediatric Home Healthcare: A Systematic Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the rising prevalence of children with medical complexity who need extensive medical care at home, the literature evaluating pediatric home healthcare has not been well summarized. Our objective was to systematically review the evidence-base of pediatric home healthcare to understand what is currently know about access and quality of home healthcare for children. Pubmed, Ovid Medline, Embase, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, Proquest Dissertations and Theses Global were searched for studies in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia English publications (1980-2020) regarding children (≤18 years) using shift-based home healthcare services. Blinded independent review was conducted followed by extraction of study characteristics including how each study examined access and/or quality, which was categorized using the National Academy of Medicine quality dimensions. Of 9533 abstracts, 101 were included. Most were US (82%) and regional (72%) studies. Half (54%) focused on home nursing followed by home services generally (43%). The majority (77%) evaluated access and patient-family centeredness (62%); their results identified consistent limitations in access and quality resulting in negative impacts on patients and families. Less than 20% of publications addressed safety, effectiveness or equity. Bias scoring found that quantitative studies were universally weak, but qualitative studies were mostly moderate or strong. Results are limited by design heterogeneity and exclusion of training research. While research in pediatric home healthcare has increased, studies remain observational and rarely evaluate quality in reproducible ways. More rigorous measures and interventional research are needed to improve this healthcare sector for children.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".