Optimising Diagnosis and Antibiotic Prescribing for Acutely Ill Children in Primary Care

"Brief interventions are commonly used to give opportunistic advice, discussion, negotiation or encouragement. Mostly they take between 5 to 10 minutes. We developed a brief intervention: we'll ask the clinicians to ask 3 specific questions, namely Are you concerned?, What exactly concerns you? and Why does this concern you?. This intervention is easy to implement in daily practice and no additional training is required.~We developed a parent information leaflet that gives information about what they can do when their child is ill, which signs are important to follow up and when they really should get advice from a clinician. This could make it easier for them to cope with an ill child. The clinician could use this leaflet to give advice and make clear when they have to re-consult their physician to re-evaluate the child. Our hypothesis is that through creating this safety net, the improper demand for antibiotics could be reduced."

All physicians will be asked to perform a measurement of the oxygen saturation on all children and enter the results on the case report form. The selected device is a clip-on system suitable for use in children, which measures oxygen saturation in the capillary blood as well as the pulse rate.