38 Chapter 2 patients are involved, the age of the participants, and the availability of patients to participate [3,9]. Future research should focus on increasing knowledge about the used methods and their suitability and impact for different research questions and target groups. This scoping review provides a descriptive overview of the existing literature about pediatric patient engagement (4-18 years) in clinical care, research, and intervention development. This overview can inform clinicians or researchers, who are insecure about how to engage pediatric patients, about the different ways in which patient engagement can be shaped, and guide them to engage pediatric patients in their project. A strength of this study is the broad approach, making it possible to map the existing literature about pediatric patient engagement in a wide range of health care. However, due to its descriptive nature, the study also has a number of limitations. First, this study did not pay attention to the impact of pediatric patient engagement in the included studies. This might be an interesting area for future research as it could give us insight into the added value of patient engagement. Second, scoping reviews do not assess the quality of the included articles [16]. However, assessing the quality of studies could help us to better understand and interpret the results found. Third, due to geographical differences, pediatric care can be interpreted differently. Therefore, we did not include populations as dentistry and psychiatry. In addition, only articles published in English were included. Last, lack of uniformity about the definition of pediatric patient engagement and the influence of tokenism made it difficult to determine what exactly is done in the studies and whether patients actually influence the decision-making process. Therefore, it is possible that we missed studies in this review or that we incorrectly included studies. In conclusion, this scoping review shows that there is an increasing interest in pediatric patient engagement. Pediatric patients are more often asked to express their views on questions in daily clinical care with the aim of improving the quality of care and tailoring care to patients’ needs. However, lack of uniformity about the definition of pediatric patient engagement and clear information and support for clinicians to engage patients in a meaningful way hinders engagement and can lead to tokenistic engagement. Guides, such as this overview, and sharing lessons learned can help clinicians to feel more confident about engaging pediatric patients in their daily practice.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw