36 Chapter 2 Figure 5. Overview of the number of articles that included pediatric patients in a specific age group Discussion This scoping review provided an overview of the existing literature about pediatric patient engagement in clinical care, research, and intervention development. The results showed an increase in the number of studies that report on pediatric patient engagement in the past decades, suggesting an increased interest in this topic. In the United States and Europe in particular, pediatric patients are more often involved in studies about clinical care, research, and intervention development compared to other countries and continents. A mix of patients from different disease groups were mostly asked for their opinion in the included studies, followed by oncology patients. Pediatric patients in the age range 9-17 years were most often engaged in a wide variety of projects compared to the other age groups. The individual interview is the most commonly used method to engage pediatric patients, followed by focus groups (for older children) and draw & write/tell techniques (for younger children). The majority of the included studies focused on the engagement of pediatric patients in clinical care with the aim to improve the quality of daily clinical care for patients. The increased attention for pediatric patient engagement in the last decade is in line with the scoping review from Van Schelven et al. [3] about the involvement of adolescents (12-25 years) in research and implementation projects. Although our scoping review has a broader scope, included many studies, and focused on younger patients (4-18 years) in daily clinical care, the findings are comparable. Also in the study from Van Schelven et al. [3] the most important goal for patient engagement is improving the quality of care. In addition, the authors mentioned the lack of uniformity around the definition of patient engagement in the literature, which we
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