• Fatma Kurudirek and Duygu Arıkan.
• Department of Child Health and Diseases Nursing, Ataturk University Faculty of Nursing, Erzurum, Turkey. Electronic address: fatmasaban25@hotmail.com.
• J Pediatr Nurs. 2020 Jul 1; 53: e6-e13.

PurposeThe aim of the present study was to explore the effect of therapeutic clowning on pain and anxiety during intrathecal chemotherapy.Design & MethodsThe study was conducted using a quasi-experimental method with a pretest-posttest control group design. The study sample was composed of children between 7 and 12 years old (N = 78) who had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and were undergoing intrathecal chemotherapy in a hospital in Turkey. The study was conducted with children who received services at this hospital. The results were obtained from 74 children (i.e. 36 in the control group, 38 in the clown group). The data were collected with a questionnaire developed by the researchers, the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and the Faces Pain Rating Scale (FACES). VAS and FACES were used to measure pain and anxiety levels. Therapeutic clowning was applied to children in the intervention group. Analyses included percentage distributions, mean, chi-square, t-test, variance, and correlation analysis.ResultsResults showed that children in the clown group had significantly lower pain and anxiety than children in the control group (p < .001).ConclusionsAccording to the results, therapeutic clowning was effective in relieving the pain and anxiety of children between the ages of 7 and 12 years who undergone intrathecal chemotherapy.Practice ImplicationsDue to its positive effects, therapeutic clowning could be explore for use in other areas of paediatric nursing for the children between the ages of 7 and 12 years as a complementary treatment.Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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