Pain management nursing : official journal of the American Society of Pain Management Nurses
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High-risk neonates experience numerous painful/stressful procedures daily in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Accumulated pain and stress have a detrimental impact on infants' neurodevelopment. Few valid tools are available to measure accumulated pain/stressors among NICU infants. ⋯ Nurses' perceptions of pain severity and acuity regarding procedures in NICUs varied somewhat. Further studies are needed in developing and validating the scale. The development of the APSS can quantitatively measure the accumulated neonatal pain/stress.
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The most painful activities during the days following cardiac surgery are coughing and deep breathing exercises. Cold therapy is an effective nonpharmacological method that decreases the pain during coughing and mobilization. In this study, the effects of cold therapy on pain and breathing exercises among patients with median sternotomy following cardiac surgery were investigated in a randomized crossover clinical trial. ⋯ Although the interaction between the treatment and time was significant (partial eta-squared: .09), the gel-pack group had a lower change in average pain levels. This interaction was not significant in terms of spirometric values. In conclusion, cold therapy had a positive effect on pain management in the early period of post-cardiac surgery but was not effective for the pain associated with breathing exercises.
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The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of white noise as a distraction method in relieving procedural pain caused by vaccination for premature infants. This experimental study was performed at a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of a university hospital in Turkey between July and September 2013. The study population was composed of 75 premature infants (35 in the study group and 40 in the control group) who met the inclusion criteria. ⋯ The authors found that 67.6% of the infants in the study group had moderate pain during vaccination and only 2.9% had severe pain. Most of the infants in the control group (82.5%) had severe pain, whereas 17.5% had moderate pain (p < .05). White noise was found to be effective for this sample; however, there is a dire need for extensive research on white noise and its use with this vulnerable population.
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Editorial Biography Historical Article
Jo Eland May Be Gone, but Her Legacy Remains.
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Providing optimal pain care for patients is essential to the work of nursing and a measure of patient satisfaction prompting some hospitals to offer pain management classes for clinicians. Although nurses generally do well on knowledge tests after attending a pain class, actual improvement in pain care for patients may not occur. The personal values of the clinician may be a key driver of pain-management decision making. ⋯ Four themes were identified among participants' answers: understanding the patient, importance of pain education, nurse's self-awareness, and interpretation of personal values. Nurses who learned how their personal values affect their pain management decisions described new insights into their own approach to pain management. More research is needed to fully understand the impact of knowing one's own values and determining which clinician values are associated with optimal pain care.