Els van Meijel

81 Parental posttraumatic stress | Chapter 5 cancer (Landolt et al., 2012). However, Bronner and colleagues found no predictive value for the length of hospital stay in parents of children that received unexpected intensive care treatment (Bronner et al., 2010). To date, severe pain in children and permanent physical impairment of injured children have not been studied in relation to parental PTSS. Obviously, parents also experience stress watching their child having severe pain. Furthermore, permanent physical impairment of children is likely to have impact on the parents, possibly comparable to the impact of extensive permanent scarring on parents of children with burns (Bakker et al., 2010). Regarding prevention of chronic posttraumatic stress, trauma-focused psychotherapy has been shown to be effective and is highly recommended by the NICE (2005). However, de Vries and colleagues stated that only 20% of the parents with PTSS seek help for themselves (de Vries et al., 1999). Given the adverse effect of parental PTSS and the positive effect of trauma-focused psychotherapy, it would be useful to know more about the choices of parents regarding psychotherapy. This information could be of help in providing support, psycho-education or interventions to parents following their child’s accidental injury and could potentially clarify the relationship of psychotherapy with long-term posttraumatic stress. The overarching aim of this study was to contribute to the knowledge of short and long-term parental posttraumatic stress following child accidental injury. In our study we therefore aimed to: 1) determine the long-term prevalence of PTSS in parents, 2–4 years after accidental injury of their child, compared with 3 months after the accident; 2) describe the association between parent prior trauma history, acute parental stress, witnessing the child’s accident, new traumatic events, child’s hospitalization, child’s severe pain and permanent physical impairment, and the severity of parental PTSS; 3) survey the choices of parents regarding trauma-focused psychotherapy. Methods Procedure From 2008 to 2010, we conducted a study in which we evaluated the Screening Tool for Early Predictors of PTSD (STEPP), a screening instrument to determine the risk of PTSD in children aged 8-18 who had been injured due to accidental trauma and in