Creating a family health history interview protocol for use with undergraduate health professional students: A scoping review

Background

Family health history can be used as a health promotion tool to assess health risk, improve data collection and disease prevention, initiate interventions, and motivate behavioral change, but its utility as a public health tool has not been fully explored. Collecting information for a family health history can be a challenging task. However, it is an important skill for undergraduate students to learn, particularly those in pre-health majors. Our aim was to create a family interview protocol for students' successful family health history collection using findings from students' research papers and a scoping review.

Study design

We summarized and listed suggestions from students' papers. Our scoping review followed Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) review process and the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Review checklist (2018).

Methods

We used Medline, CINAHL (EBSCO), ERIC (ProQuest), Web of Science, and Academic Search Premiere databases and Google. Using Covidence, we included peer-reviewed, English, journal articles and grey literature, narrowing our key term combinations to terms like family health history, interview or protocol, and undergraduate or health professional student.

Results

Protocol suggestions included having appropriate settings and preparation to conduct interviews with questions on socio-demographics, cultural and family relationship dynamics, health behaviors, and acute and chronic condition questions for family members. Students' papers addressed preparation for conducting interviews and obtaining better data from existing family trees and extended relatives to maximize learning about risk assessment. The scoping review revealed two themes associated with family health history, including creating genograms and interview methods used with history taking.

Conclusions

Implementing the protocol for future assignments will provide students with a training opportunity to identify their own disease risks, improve their family health history knowledge, and collect family health history data relevant to prevention and interventions focused on understanding chronic conditions and their management.