Articles: acute-pain.
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Parental responses to children's pain shape how children interpret and cope with pain symptoms through parental modelling and operant conditioning. Evidence suggests that parental distraction is effective in reducing children's acute pain responses, but findings are inconsistent across pain tolerance, intensity and unpleasantness, and are limited to samples of primarily middle and upper-middle class families. Although socioeconomically disadvantaged families may have fewer psychological resources to cope with pain, no studies have examined whether the utility of parent distraction varies by family socioeconomic status (SES). The current study tested the hypothesis that relations between parental distraction and acute pain responses in children vary by family SES, with children from higher versus lower SES families experiencing more substantial benefits. ⋯ Study findings suggest that the effects of parental distraction on children's responses to an acute pain task vary by family SES. Although parental distraction may be effective for higher SES children, further research is needed to identify whether and why distraction may not be beneficial for lower SES families.
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Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and other negative psychosocial factors have been implicated in the transition from acute to persistent pain. Women (N = 375) who presented to an inner-city emergency department (ED) with complaints of acute pain were followed up for 3 months. They completed a comprehensive battery of questionnaires at an initial visit and provided ratings of pain intensity at the site of pain presented in the ED during 3 monthly phone calls. ⋯ The no recovery group reported significantly greater PTSD symptoms, anger, sleep disturbance, and lower social support at the initial visit than both the early recovery and delayed recovery groups. Results suggest that women with high levels of PTSD symptoms, anger, sleep disturbance, and low social support who experience an acute pain episode serious enough to prompt an ED visit may maintain elevated pain at this pain site for at least 3 months. Such an array of factors may place women at an increased risk of developing persistent pain following acute pain.
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Judicious spending in healthcare is of paramount importance, particularly when introducing new devices or interventions. These products or interventions need to be economically efficient both directly and indirectly. An accepted method of cost estimation is micro-costing. Micro-costing involves direct enumeration and costing of every input consumed in the treatment of a particular patient when using new device, medicine or intervention. In our study, we investigated the cost of using a novel sublingual (SL) patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) device and compared it with our conventional intravenous (IV) PCA device. ⋯ After performance of a micro-costing study, the less costly IV PCA episode was statistically significant compared with a SL PCA episode. However, the associated staff costs were less with a SL PCA episode. We performed a micro-costing study on a novel sublingual PCA device and compared it with a conventional intravenous PCA device. All resources were included and compared.