Better communication with children and parents

Consultations with families are a fundamental part of paediatric practice. We will each undertake thousands during a professional lifetime, yet many of us will not have had specific training in how to manage triadic (three-way) consultations involving children. The aim of this review is to start to address this deficiency. Drawing from the communication literature, we will look at what children and parents want from their doctors, where we fall short as clinicians and how we can improve our consultation behaviour.