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Published on: November 29, 2017
[Pain evaluation in neonatology.]
Yerkes Pereira E Silva1, Renato Santiago Gomez, Thadeu Alves Máximo
1Hospital Life Center, Belo Horizonte, MG.
Insights
Accurate pain assessment in neonates is crucial for effective treatment. This review discusses methods for evaluating pain in newborns, emphasizing its importance as the fifth vital sign.
Area of Science:
- Neonatal care
- Pain management
- Clinical assessment
Context:
- Effective pain management in neonates is challenging due to the lack of a universally accepted evaluation method.
- Existing pain assessment tools in neonatology have limitations.
- Health professionals require reliable instruments for accurate pain data collection.
Purpose:
- To review and discuss current methods for evaluating pain in neonatology.
- To highlight the importance of systematic pain assessment in newborns.
- To emphasize the inadequacy of treatment strategies without systematic pain evaluation.
Summary:
- Pain assessment in neonates involves evaluating physiological and behavioral parameters using various scales.
- No single, universally accepted, easy-to-apply technique exists for neonatal pain assessment.
- Objective standardization of pain severity measurement in newborns is still lacking.
Impact:
- Improved sensitivity of healthcare professionals to the nature of painful experiences in newborns.
- Advocates for treating pain as the fifth vital sign in neonatal care.
- Promotes the development and adoption of more effective pain management strategies in neonatology.
Background And Objectives:
The study of pain has seen a great development in the last decades, making evaluation and intervention a growing concern among health professionals. The objective of pain evaluation should be to provide accurate data to determine the actions that should be taken to relieve or abolish it and, at the same time, to evaluate the efficacy of those actions. The objective of this review was to discuss the methods used to evaluate pain in neonatology, since treatment strategies used without systematic pain evaluation are not effective or adequate.
Contents:
A widely accepted, easy to apply and uniform technique to evaluate pain in children, especially newborns and infants, that can be used in all situations does not exist. Before trusting the accuracy of the data, it is necessary that health professionals trust the instruments used to collect the data. Several indicators can be used to evaluate, quantify, and qualify the painful stimulus and, when analyzed as a set, allow the discrimination between pain and non-painful stimuli. Although the objective standardization of measuring pain severity is desirable, it does not exist. Measurement of pain in this age group is done by assessing physiological (heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and etc.) and behavioral (facial expression, posture, and vocalization or verbalization) parameters using evaluation scales, each one with its advantages and limitations.
Conclusions:
The current concern with better methods to measure and evaluate pain contributed to increase the sensitivity of health professionals regarding the nature of painful experiences. Pain should be valued as the fifth vital sign and evaluated in a systemized manner, including in newborns.
