Parental Beliefs about Fever in Children: Cultural Transmission and Sustainable Healthcare

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Sustainability of health systems depends on their ability to provide sufficient resources to meet the needs of the population. However, there is increasing pressure from globalisation and consumerism, aging populations, and changes in the epidemiology and treatment of disease.

Within the United Kingdom, the response to these includes increasing the diversity of healthcare providers, and encouraging lay and self-care. Other health systems are making similar changes in their provision. However, for this to be effective, accurate treatment information needs to be widely disseminated and accepted.

As children account for a significant proportion of service usage and they have carers, there is potential to exploit these new models of care with them. However, parents do not always make rational choices about treatments. Fever is a common reason for their accessing health services, however, studies from Italy, United Kingdom, United States and Saudi Arabia have shown that many parents have exaggerated fears and have difficulties with some aspects of its treatment, even though they may have accurate knowledge of the causes of fever.

This may be an evolutionary neutral response to historical morbidity and mortality associated with infectious disease, an adaptive response encouraging caring interventions, or a maladaptive response that may cause harm. The limited success of education may reflect the power of dual inheritance of cultural traits, fear spreading through biased transmission as the result of it being modelled by professionals and significant others. This model predicts that evidence-based guidelines will have less influence because they are symbolic rather than directly modeled.

This paper considers the importance of understanding lay beliefs, their origin, method of transmission, and the effect that medical and lay culture has upon the sustainability of health systems. This allows the development of interventions which empower parents, thus reducing fear and the pressure on health systems.

Stream: Economic Sustainability

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

I am a Lecturer specialising in infectious diseases and paediatric nursing at King's College London. Having gained a MSc in microbiology from Birkbeck College London, I completed a PhD looking at parental responses to fever and common childhood illnesses in their children. My current research focus is on integrating the scientific and cultural aspects of illness, symptom control, and treatment. I am particularly interested in the policy and long-term sustainability implications of these, and how they are viewed in different cultures.