What do official public reports convey about paediatric activity?

Introduction: paediatrics is a medical specialty that unfolds in the primary care and hospital settings. Knowing how the outcomes of paediatric practice are officially reported may be the first step to compare them and establish a culture of transparency and trust in the system, and to establish and prioritise improvement actions.

Material and methods: descriptive observational study. We identified institutional websites (Ministry of Health, regional health authorities) and analysed the information on paediatric care delivery, its accessibility, level of aggregation, recency, formatting and analysis of sex and age. We assessed inter-observer agreement.

Results: 17 institutions provided information on indicators. The most used were the visits managed, caseloads and frequency of health care utilization. The information is free, difficult to access, and updated within the past 2 years (2019). Most of the data were disaggregated (15) and in PDF format. The number of indicators ranged from 1 to 38 (mean, 9). Only 4 regions presented information based on sex and age. We found a Cohen kappa coefficient (κ) of 0.89.

Conclusions: the information on health care indicators and outcomes of paediatric care provided by healthcare institutions is heterogeneous. To gain transparency and trust, and to facilitate the comparison between organizations, it should be easier to obtain, homogeneous and clearer.