Family-Centred Care for Children with Biopsychosocial Support Needs: A Scoping Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for allowing me to review your manuscript.  I enjoyed reading it and think it provides a robust and comprehensive review of the practice of family centred care. 

My only question relates to your use of the term 'biopsychosocial' - can it not reasonably be argued that all children have biopsychosocial needs?  I am unclear which group of children you are focusing on. Is it children with unmet or additional needs for example?  In the UK at least we promote a biopsychosocial approach to care of all children and families, recognising the complex interactions between these elements and the benefits of such on professional/family relationships, patient outcomes, compliance. 

I was unsure which children you were focusing on from the title, but having read and reread the paper, I'm still not sure.  I think making this clear would enhance the paper. 

I believe your paper will make a valuable contribution to the available literature on family centred care for children. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In my view, this is an exceptional review – thorough, applied, well written and presented. It provides a highly useful Framework for Processes of Implementing FCC, thus making a great contribution to the field of both theorietical and applied FFC. Given the high quality of this research, I have just a few suggestions for small improvements to make sure all the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed (so to speak).

In the introduction, please add a rationale as to why the ICF is an appropriate frame of reference for this review. Please can you also add a bit more descriptive detail about the ICF in the methods i.e. why was it developed, what are its major components, is it holistic and thus takes families into consideration? 

Please state why 2005 was the lower boundary for the literature search i.e. was this when FCC first started being discussed in the academic literature or in practice in this population? If it was to limit the number of papers returned, then please state this.

The authors should be commended on their extensive search strategy. My only query is whether hyphenated versions of the first set of key terms (i.e. 'family centred' and 'family focused') were included in the search? Please clarify this as it could make a considerable difference to the number of studies retrieved. If the hyphenated versions weren't included, it may be worth rerunning the search to check that it does not return a number of additional relevant papers. If it does, the authors will have to consider whether they should revise the manuscript to synthesise any additional evidence. Alternatively, if they cannot do this, they will need to state this as a limitation.

If it is within the author's ability (and not a facet of journal style), please can a repeating header be added to Tables 3-5 so that the headings for each column are included on each page. This would make the necessarily sizeable and usefully comprehensive tables much easier to navigate.

In  the population characteristics, it would be interesting for the authors to note whether there was a majority of papers from any age group (e.g. children above 5) or whether the age ranges were often very wide in the studies.

Please can the authors add percentages wherever an n=x is given, as this makes comparability within and between characteristics much easier for the reader. For example, in Section 3.2 in particular, put ‘(n=x; x%)’ instead of just ‘(n=x)’.

I think Section 3.4 needs a little clarification as it is not always clear to whom the personal contextual measurements relate i.e. is the child with disabilities or the primary caregiver or both? Likewise, is the focus of the intervention always the child or does it extend to the wider family? Please can you also report whether any studies used the same measures or whether they were all unique.

Figure 2 requires a key to explain the colour coding.

This really is a very well written manuscript. I have noted just a few minor missing words. For example, ‘to’ is missing in line 367 and ‘a’ is missing in line 502.

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf