The Sugarsquare study: protocol of a multicenter randomized controlled trial concerning a web-based patient portal for parents of a child with type 1 diabetes

Background Type 1 diabetes demands a complicated disease self-management by child and parents. The overwhelming task of combining every day parenting tasks with demands of taking care of a child with diabetes can have a profound impact on parents, often resulting in increased parenting stress. Tailored disease information, easy accessible communication with healthcare professionals and peer support are found to support parents to adequately cope with the disease and the disease self-management in everyday life. Internet can help facilitate these important factors in usual pediatric diabetes care. Therefore, we will develop a web-based patient portal in addition to usual pediatric diabetes care and subsequently evaluate its efficacy and feasibility. The web-based patient portal, called Sugarsquare, provides online disease information, and facilitates online parent-professional communication and online peer support. We hypothesize that parenting stress in parents of a child with type 1 diabetes will decrease by using Sugarsquare and that Sugarsquare will be feasible in this population.