Children With Fever and Respiratory Symptoms at Out-of-hours Services in Norway

NORCE Norwegian Research Centre AS

Status: Terminated

Conditions: Children

Treatments: Procedure: Pre-consultation CRP

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT02496559

NKLM 2012/1471 RV

Details and patient eligibility

About

Viral self-limiting infections in respiratory organs among children are common in primary care. Serious infections have low prevalence and are challenging to distinguish from self-limiting infections.

Prescription of antibiotics in primary care is still high but stable since 2009 in Norway, and 90% of all antibiotics are prescribed in primary care.

C-reactive protein (CRP) has been especially popular in Norway for point-of-care testing in primary care, but its role in ruling-out serious infections and the cut-off value for prescribing antibiotics has been discussed a lot.

The aim of this study is to identify if pretesting with CRP of all children 0-6 year with fever or respiratory symptoms at Out-of-Hours Services will affect the prescription of antibiotics and the referral to hospital for children.

Full description

Design: A randomized controlled observational study including children 0-6 year with fever and/or respiratory symptoms at 4 different Out-of-hour Services and at 1 Emergency Children Department Clinic at a hospital (open clinic). The data consist of clinical data and anamnestic information from a nurse at OOH-service collected before the consultation, the doctor's journal and a questionnaire to parents before the consultation and 1 week after the consultation.

Enrollment: 401 patients

Sex: All

Ages: Under 6 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Children 0-6 years with fever and/or respiratory symptoms

Exclusion criteria

• Children older than 6 years with other conditions

Trial design

Primary purpose: Diagnostic

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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401 participants in 2 patient groups

Pre-consultation CRP

Active Comparator group

Description:

Every third child included get a CRP-test before the consultation and the doctor have the answer at start of consultation

Treatment:

Procedure: Pre-consultation CRP

CRP requested

No Intervention group

Description:

No intervention, the consultation with children as normal, the CRP is used at doctors request.