In the December 2018 edition of the Journal of Korean Medical Science (volume 33, issue 49, e327), we published an article entitled “Discordance between physician and the general public perceptions of prognostic disclosure to children with serious illness: a Korean nationwide study.” While recently extending that research, however, we discovered that 236 members of the general population were mistakenly to be duplicated by the investigating agency (Word Research) and 1,241 were reported rather than 1,005. Here we present corrections and discuss the relevant data.
In the abstract, the results paragraph (page 1/10) should be corrected to the following:
A total of 928 physicians and 1,005 members of the general public in Korea completed the questionnaire. Whereas 92.8% of physicians said that children should be informed of their incurable illness, only 50.7% of the general population agreed.
In the general population, gender, religion, comorbidity, and caregiver experience were related to attitude toward poor prognosis disclosure to children.
In the methods of the paper, the last paragraph (page 2/10) should be corrected to the following:
For the general population, we sampled 1,005 locally distributed respondents who were 20–70 years of age using the probability-proportional-to-size technique14 and administered the structured questionnaire.
Our original Table 1 (page 4/10), should be corrected to the following:
Our original Figure 1 (page 5/10), should be corrected to the following:
Our original Table 2 (page 5/10), should be corrected to the following:
Our original Table 3 (page 6/10), should be corrected to the following:
Our original Table 4 (page 7/10), should be corrected to the following:
In the results of the paper, the first 3 sentences of the paragraph (page 3/10) should be corrected to the following:
Sample characteristics
A total of 1,005 members of the general population and 928 physicians in Korea completed the questionnaire. The physician group was composed of more men than women and was significantly younger than the general population. There were also more people who were religious (58.4% vs. 41.8%), had a comorbidity (6.3% vs. 3.1%), and had caregiver experience (51.2% vs. 22.5%) in the physician group than in the general population.
In the results of the paper, the 2nd sentence of the paragraph ‘Attitudes toward disclosing incurable illness to children according to patient’s age’ (page 4/10) should be corrected to the following:
Among physicians, only 7.2% of respondents said they do not want children to be informed of the serious illness, whereas 49.3% of the general population were opposed to this disclosure.
In the results of the paper, the 2nd sentence of the paragraph ‘Univariate logistic regression analyses of factors related to disclosure to children’ (page 4-5/10) should be corrected to the following:
Among the general population, respondents who were male or had religion, existing comorbidity, or caregiver experience were more likely to want to disclose serious illness to children.
In the results of the paper, the 2nd and 3rd sentences of the paragraph ‘Multiple logistic regression analyses of factors related to disclosure to children’ (page 5/10) should be corrected to the following:
In the general population analysis, respondents who were male (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 1.304; 95% CI, 1.074–1.585) or had comorbidity (aOR, 1.668; 95% CI, 1.034–2.690), or caregiver experience (aOR, 1.854; 95% CI, 1.514–2.270) were more likely to think children with incurable illness should be told about their health status. In the physician analysis, respondents who were female (aOR, 2.549; 95% CI, 1.706–3.809) or religious (aOR, 1.819; 95% CI, 1.265–2.615) were more likely to want to inform children about their poor prognosis.
In the discussion section, the 3rd sentence of the 4th paragraph (page 7/10) should be corrected to the following:
In our study, only 16.6% of the general public said that pediatric patients should be informed of their poor prognosis if they are over 12 years old, whereas 57.9% of physicians agreed with this statement.
In the discussion section, the 5th paragraph (page 8/10) should be corrected to the following:
Having comorbidity, and caregiver experiences were found to be independently associated with agreement with prognostic disclosure to children with serious illnesses in general public group. Respondents with comorbidity or caregiver experiences might have had a chance to think about the necessities of talking about health status with loved ones.
We wish to apologize to the publisher and readers of Journal of Korean Medical Science for these errors.