Of 388 results, 122 duplicates were removed and 266 were screened for title and abstract. Of these, 80 full-text publications were screened and 15 were included for data extraction. One additional study was identified by B.W. and M.Z. in the grey literature (Fig. 1). Active clinical trials registered with ClinicalTrials.gov and ICTRP were also searched on the topic and 4 were identified.

PRISMA-ScR flow diagram mapping the process used to include and exclude publications from the database searches. The databases searched were MEDLINE, Embase and Grey Matters

Sixteen studies examined associations between patient education and management of AD [22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37]. The majority were from the United States (n = 4), Korea (n = 2) and Germany (n = 3). There was one study each from the following countries: Belgium, England, Spain, China, Brazil, Singapore and Japan. Data from 4,541 participants was represented. The largest study included 1,628 participants [33], while the smallest evaluated 18 patients [35]. The largest study had the shortest follow-up time of 2 weeks [33]. Time to follow-up was broad, ranging from 2 weeks to 1 year. One study measured outcomes at three time points after education [23], 6 studies measured outcomes at two time points [25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34] and 8 studies measured outcomes at one time point [22, 24, 27, 28, 31, 33, 35,36,37]. Of the included studies, the majority directed education towards in caregivers and children (n = 12) [24,25,26, 28, 29, 31,32,33,34,35,36,37]. Three studies reported on adults [22, 23, 27] and one study included all ages [30]. Most studies were randomized controlled trials (RCT; n = 11) [22,23,24, 26,27,28,29,30, 32, 35, 37] to examine the association between patient education and AD management. All studies evaluated multiple outcome measures; QoL (n = 9) [23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 34, 36, 37] and disease severity (n = 10) [22, 23, 27,28,29, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37] were measured most frequently. Patient/caregiver knowledge or understanding (n = 5) [22, 25, 29, 34, 35], parental self-efficacy (n = 2) [34, 36] and depression/anxiety scores (n = 3) [27, 30, 32] were other outcome measurements.

Twelve studies educated children with AD and their caregivers (Table 1) [24,25,26, 28, 29, 31,32,33,34,35,36,37]. Most performed education in the presence of both child and caregiver while 3 studies targeted only parents/caregivers [25, 33, 37]. A variety of education methods were used including individual consultations with a healthcare professional [25, 26, 33], group based education sessions [29, 31, 32, 34, 37], eczema action plans [24, 35], a handbook [28] and the web-based education program that included self-assessment quizzes and written information about AD and its management (described in more detail below) [36].

One study investigated the efficacy of pharmacist counseling on caregiver’s knowledge, level of confidence in care and satisfaction of counseling [25]. The counseling was efficacious in improving caregiver knowledge [25]. The other outcome measures were measured qualitatively but showed positive results [25]. Interestingly, this study reported only 34% of caregivers had received previous explanations on AD [25], suggesting that over half of the AD caregivers received a prescription before a treatment explanation.

Two studies implemented single nurse educational consultations of similar times (30–45 min). [26, 33]. The content of the consultations in both studies were similar, focusing mainly on reinforcing care recommendations, demonstrating practical skills and establishing parent’s/child’s knowledge and understanding of eczema. Although the interventions are comparable, the studies used different outcome measures. Chinn et al. measured changes in family impact and QoL at two time points (4 & 12 weeks) following the nurse consultation and found no significant improvement [26], whereas Rolinck-Werninghaus et al. measured parental assessments of their self-confidence in care and the child’s subjective disease severity and found both of these measures were improved 2 weeks after the consultation.

Group-based educational programs of varying lengths were used to educate AD children/caregivers in 5 studies [29, 31, 32, 34, 37]. Most were weekly sessions, occurring 4–6 times [29, 34,