Web-based ehealth to support counseling in routine well-child Care: Pilot study of e-health4uth home safety

Background: providing safety education to parents of young children is important in the prevention of unintentional injuries in or around the home. we developed a web-based,tailored safety advice module to support face-to-face counseling in the setting of preventive youth health care (e-health4uth home safety) in order to improve the provision of safety information for parents of young children. objective: this pilot study evaluated a web-based,tailored safety advice module (e-health4uth home safety) and evaluated the use of e-health4uth home safety to support counseling in routine well-child care visits. methods: from a preventive youth health care center,312 parents with a child aged 10-31 months were assigned to the e-health4uth home safety condition or to the care-as-usual condition (provision of a generic safety information leaflet). all parents completed a questionnaire either via the internet or paper-and-pencil,and parents in the e-health4uth condition received tailored home safety advice either online or by a print that was mailed to their home. this tailored home safety advice was used to discuss the safety of their home during the next scheduled well-child visit. parents in the care-as-usual condition received a generic safety information leaflet during the well-child visit. results: mean age of the parents was 32.5 years (sd 5.4),87.8% (274/312) of participants were mothers; mean age of the children was 16.9 months (sd 5.1). in the e-health4uth condition,38.4% (61/159) completed the online version of the questionnaire (allowing web-based tailored safety advice),61.6% (98/159) preferred to complete the questionnaire via paper (allowing only a hardcopy of the advice to be sent by regular mail). parents in the e-health4uth condition evaluated the web-based,tailored safety advice (n=61) as easy to use (mean 4.5,sd 0.7),pleasant (mean 4.0,sd 0.9),reliable (mean 4.6,sd 0.6),understandable (mean 4.6,sd 0.5),relevant (mean 4.2,sd 0.9),and useful (mean 4.3,sd 0.8). after the well-child visit,no significant differences were found between the e-health4uth condition and care-as-usual condition with regard to the satisfaction with the information received (n=61,p=.51). health care professionals (n=43) rated the tailored safety advice as adequate (mean 4.0,sd 0.4) and useful (mean 3.9,sd 0.4). conclusions: less than half of the parents accepted the invitation to complete a web-based questionnaire to receive online tailored safety advice prior to a face-to-face consultation. despite wide access to the internet,most parents preferred to complete questionnaires using paper-and-pencil. in the subgroup that completed e-health4uth home safety online,evaluations of e-health4uth home safety were positive. however,satisfaction scores with regard to tailored safety advice were not different from those with regard to generic safety information leaflets.