Brief report: Parent report about health care use: Relationship to child'sand parent's psychosocial problems

Objective: To investigate the potential utility of: asking parents about he alth care utilization as a means of identifying individuals at risk for psy chosocial problems. Method: Parents of 366 children ages 2 to 16 completed questionnaires about their own, their child's, and their family's psychosocial functioning and health care utilization. Results: Children and parents with high health care utilization were more l ikely to have psychosocial problems than those with low health care utiliza tion. Sensitivity and specificity of health care utilization as a marker fo r psychosocial problems ranged from 43.8% to 68.8%. Conclusions: Although high rates of child health care utilization are relat ed to the presence of psychosocial problems, use of this measure alone coul d result in many false-positive and false-negative identifications. Rather, use of health care utilization data in conjunction with other screening me asures may be useful for alerting physicians to the possibility of both chi ld and parent psychosocial problems.