Khan 2004.

Methods	Randomised controlled trial
Participants	310 children with asthma who were discharged from a hospital emergency department in Sydney, Australia
Interventions	Parents of children in the intervention group received a telephone consultation by an experienced asthma nurse educator within 2 weeks of discharge. This consultation emphasised the advice given to the parents at the time of discharge. These calls lasted an average of 13 min (range 5 to 44 minutes). Parents of both the intervention and control groups received written materials regarding facts about asthma, use of spacers, management of exercise induced asthma and when to contact a doctor. Control: This group did not receive the follow‐up telephone call, however they did receive written material regarding asthma at baseline, before their discharge from the emergency department
Outcomes	Outcome measures: 1. Number of days of wheezing in the last 3 months 2. Possession and use of a written asthma action plan during a crisis 3. Use of preventer medication 4. Increased asthma knowledge scores (Newcastle Asthma Knowledge Questionnaire) 5. Parental quality of life scores (Juniper Caregiver's Quality of Life Questionnaire) 6. Number of visits to GP/paediatricians 7. Number of attendances at emergency department and admissions to hospital with asthma in the previous 6 months
Notes	This study may have had insufficient power to show real differences between the groups as the children mainly had mild episodic symptoms. The context of following up an emergency department visit is also important, as it can be considered as a kind of "window of opportunity" to educate patients and children and parents in both arms by giving them written and verbal information regarding control of asthma. The effect of this is that patients and their parents may be more receptive to the messages regarding medication adherence and control in the acute situation.
Risk of bias
Bias	Authors' judgement	Support for judgement
Random sequence generation (selection bias)	Low risk	“An asthma educator randomly assigned children to either intervention or control using a list of random numbers that had been provided to her”
Allocation concealment (selection bias)	Unclear risk	"children's details were faxed to an asthma educator working in New South Wales" sounds as though this might be an attempt at central randomisation but this is not made explicit
Blinding (performance bias and detection bias) All outcomes	Low risk	Outcome assessment by postal questionnaire, therefore single‐blinded. Not possible to blind participants to intervention
Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias) All outcomes	Low risk	310 children enrolled in study, 266 (86%) completed the follow‐up questionnaire. 22 had changes their address and 22 were non‐responders. 130 control children completed follow up and 155 intervention children completed follow up. "Children lost to follow‐up were similar demographically and in terms of asthma severity when compared to those who completed the study".
Selective reporting (reporting bias)	Low risk	"All analyses were specified a priori"
Other bias	High risk	49% of parents were excluded (exclusion criteria not published). Parents whose English was inadequate to complete the questionnaires were also excluded, this might mean that the population in greatest need were excluded as non‐English speakers are often socioeconomically deprived populations.