Pain expert calls on clinicians to stop needle pain for kids

One of many world’s main specialists in pediatric ache administration is looking upon clinicians nationwide to hitch an “Ouchless Jab Problem,” to remove the ache, trauma and anxiousness of needle jabs for younger youngsters.

Led by UCSF Benioff Kids’s Hospitals pediatrician Stefan Friedrichsdorf, MD, the problem goals to interact the medical neighborhood to make use of easy strategies to handle the only largest supply of worry and anxiousness for kids in a well being care setting.

“In a medical setting, youngsters are overwhelmingly afraid of needles, and research present that some youngsters are so afraid of needles that they do not inform their households or docs that they’re sick or in pain,” mentioned Friedrichsdorf, the medical director of UCSF’s Stad Heart for Pediatric Ache, Palliative and Integrative Drugs. “Kids with unrelieved ache flip into adults with a lot increased charges of chronic pain, anxiousness and melancholy, and this may be prevented.”

An estimated 25% of adults have a worry of needles stemming from childhood, leading to long-term penalties that embody needle phobia, pre-procedural anxiousness, disproportionately severe pain, and an avoidance of well being practitioners.

The problem calls upon clinicians to implement easy, age-appropriate steps to cut back needle ache and worry, starting from numbing the injection web site to utilizing soothing, enjoyable or distraction strategies that calm the kid throughout needle procedures. Friedrichsdorf additionally encourages mother and father to request these strategies for his or her youngsters.

A brand new problem

The “Ouchless Jab Problem” provides easy steps to appease and distract youngsters previous to a needle process of any type:

• Numbing cream (resembling over-the-counter 4% lidocaine cream) utilized earlier than every needle process
• Sugar water or breastfeeding for infants 0 to 12 months
• Consolation positioning, together with swaddling infants and skin-to-skin contact with mother and father, and sitting upright for kids—by no means holding a baby down
• Age-appropriate distractions

The “Ouchless Jab Problem” is step one of the Stad Heart’s “Consolation Promise” to UCSF Benioff sufferers to “do every part attainable to forestall and deal with ache, together with the ache of needles, for each little one, each time.”

The “Consolation Promise” has been a part of the Stad Heart’s mission because it was fashioned in 2022 with a present from Elisa and Marc Stad as an intensive, interdisciplinary and rehabilitative inpatient and outpatient ache clinic that treats youngsters and teenagers affected by acute and power ache, together with the discomfort from sickle cell illness. Co-led by a major care nurse practitioner, Barbette Murphy, MSN, and a therapeutic little one life specialist, Kristen Beckler, MEd, the Consolation Promise has been rolled out to the primary of many items at UCSF Benioff Kids’s Hospitals.

The middle has served a number of thousand sufferers up to now and is now one of the crucial modern and complete applications of its type within the nation. Friedrichsdorf now leads an prolonged, specialised workforce of built-in medication and ache specialists who present consultative providers with state-of-the-art know-how and modern strategies to work collaboratively with suppliers from throughout the well being system.

Held down as a baby

Friedrichsdorf remembers being traumatized as a baby, when he was held down for a medical process whereas screaming in ache. In maturity, he vowed to discover a higher solution to acknowledge youngsters’s ache and do no matter attainable to attenuate it.

Greater than 1 in 5 youth endure from extreme power ache, resembling complications/migraines, abdominal pain, and muscle and joint discomfort, in addition to acute ache from underlying illnesses resembling sickle cell illness. The Stad Heart treats youngsters from delivery into their teenagers utilizing a number of modes of ache administration, combining superior and protected ache drugs with physical therapy, psychology, nerve blocks and integrative therapies.

Integrative therapies embody acupuncture, acupressure, therapeutic massage, aromatherapy, meditation and medical hypnosis. The middle additionally makes a speciality of pediatric palliative care, with the purpose of bettering the standard of life for children with life-limiting diseases, permitting them to dwell as lengthy and in addition to attainable.