A randomized clinical trial of the building on family strengths program: an education program for parents of children with chronic health conditions.

To test the 6-month efficacy of an inclusive non-diagnosis-specific, 7-session parent education curriculum on five pre-specified outcomes. A randomized clinical trial with 100 parents having children 2-11 years with a variety of chronic conditions was conducted. The 7-session curriculum, Building on Family Strengths (BFS), was created by an interdisciplinary pediatric team as a derivative of a successful adult chronic disease self-Management program distributed by Stanford University Patient and Education Research Center.

Managing childhood chronic illness: parent perspectives and implications for parent-provider relationships.

When children have special health care needs, parents assume the roles of care coordinator, medical expert, and systems advocate as well as their typical parenting roles. They face many challenges in managing their child's chronic condition in the context of everyday life. Health care providers are uniquely positioned to assist parents in meeting those challenges and to promote parent competency and confidence in their child's care.

Teaching professionalism to residents.

The need to teach professionalism during residency has been affirmed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which will require documentation of education and evaluation of professionalism by 2007. Recently the American Academy of Pediatrics has proposed the following components of professionalism be taught and measured: honesty/integrity, reliability/responsibility, respect for others, compassion/empathy, self-improvement, self-awareness/knowledge of limits, communication/collaboration, and altruism/advocacy. The authors describe a curriculum for introducing the above principles of professionalism into a pediatrics residency that could serve as a model for other programs.