Title: Essential Pediatric Hypertension: Defining the Educational Needs of
Primary Care Pediatricians
Reviewer's report - 1
Title: Essential Pediatric Hypertension: Defining the Educational Needs of
Primary Care Pediatricians
Version: 2 Date: 26 June 2013
Reviewer: Nick Cooper
Reviewer's report:
Minor essentail revisions;
This is an interesting topic in child health education in view of the spread of
childhood obesity in the Western World and is set in North American practice
where in the UK a primary care physician may initially diagnose these problems
compared to an office paediatrician.
1.1. It would be useful to explore what methods of needs analysis are available and
the rationale for choosing focus groups.
In designing this project we considered a number of elicitation approaches including
written survey with open and closed-ended responses, one-on-one interviews and focus
groups. We selected focus groups as our preferred method because we wanted to
capitalize on the within group interactions that would be generated from our semistructured discussion guide. We believed that such data would be more information rich
than interviews or surveys.
While the set up of these groups was
clearly described I was unsure whether the methodology was 'grounded theory'
and may be better described as 'thematic analysis'.
We agree that the methodology used is more correctly described as thematic analysis
since we did not intend to develop a theory or theoretical framework from our analyses.
This change has been made in the manuscript.
1.2. It would be helpful to expand on what the authors meant by 'learning
preferences' and the contemporary debate about the relevance of learning styles
and how different participants 'preferred style' may impact upon their method of
learning.
We note that it was not our intent to consider the concept of “learning style” in our focus
groups. Instead, we were interested in understanding preferences for mode of delivery.
In other words, we were hoping to learn how physicians preferred to have information
delivered rather than how they learned best. This has been briefly clarified in the
manuscript.
1.3. In the discussion please expand on why certain themes ' stood out and
deserve special attention..'
We have clarified in the manuscript why certain themes were identified and based on
the frequency of their observation, we have concluded that addressing these two major
themes would improve care of children with hypertension. We also elected to briefly
explain the other 3 major themes.
1.4. A clearer rationale for the design of the educational sessions needs to be
framed and how this fits with the earlier discussion about 'learning preferences' It
would be worth referring to the work of Liz Armstrong and others at Harvard re
models of CPD linking this to Kolb's learning cycle.
We propose multiple educational methods to meet our learners’ needs since it is
apparent from their input that no one approach that would address all (or the majority) of
the themes. We have cited work by Liz Armstrong regarding CPD linking models and
have linked them to Kolb’s learning cycle.
Level of interest: An article whose findings are important to those with closely
related research interests
Quality of written English: Acceptable
Statistical review: No, the manuscript does not need to be seen by a
statistician.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare that I have no competing interests
Reviewer's report - 2
Title:Essential Pediatric Hypertension: Defining the Educational Needs of
Primary Care Pediatricians
Version:2Date:14 April 2014
Reviewer:Ravi Thiagarajan
Reviewer's report:
In their manuscript on defining the educational needs of primary care
pediatricians, Cha et al report on level of experience and their preference on
methods for education. They use focus groups to gather level of understanding,
comfort with managing essential hypertension, and educational preferences. The
manuscript addresses an important health issue and is well written.
Specific Comments:
2.1.Few community based practice pediatricians included in the focus groups.
Given that these physicians see a bulk of these patients – I think these data
would be difficult to generalize to the community physicians. Do they plan on
extending the survey to these physicians?
These groups are representative of the primary care pediatricians who provide care for
our pediatric patients in our community and we believe that these pediatricians are
representative of the physicians who will be confronted with the complexities of
information regarding hypertension in children with their subsequent clinical demands.
The physicians interviewed all diagnose, evaluate and treat hypertension in children.
2.2.There are a number of typographical errors in the manuscript and these require
careful editing.
Typographical errors were addressed.
Level of interest:An article of importance in its field
Quality of written English:Needs some language corrections before being
published
Statistical review:No, the manuscript does not need to be seen by a statistician.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare I have no competing interests