How Does the Helping Alliance Relate to Treatment Satisfaction? Dyadic Analyses in Pediatric Pain Patients, Caregivers, and Healthcare Professionals.

Objectives: Preliminary evidence suggests that children and adolescents with high impact chronic primary pain benefit from intensive interdisciplinary pain treatment involving both patients and their caregivers. While it is important for patients and caregivers to be satisfied with the treatment, previous studies have not observed an association between treatment satisfaction and other treatment outcomes, such as pain symptoms. We hypothesized that the helping alliance - both between patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs) and between caregivers and HCPs - plays a role in treatment satisfaction.

Methods: We computed two actor-partner interdependence models to analyze the dyadic associations between the predictor helping alliance and the outcome treatment satisfaction. Analyses were based on data from n = 205 patients, n = 191 caregivers, and n = 197 HCPs.

Results: Findings revealed that patients' and caregivers' treatment satisfaction was positively associated with the quality of their respective helping alliance with their HCP. Notably, patients' perceptions of their alliance with HCPs were positively associated with caregiver treatment satisfaction, and caregivers' perceptions of their alliance with HCPs were linked to patients' treatment satisfaction.

Discussion: These findings highlight the importance of viewing pediatric pain patients, caregivers, and HCPs as an interdependent network. Future studies may extend our findings to other clinical settings and longitudinally.