Increasing the Use of Newborn Pain Treatment Following the Implementation of a Parent-Targeted Video: An Outcome...

Despite strong evidence that breastfeeding, skin-to-skin care, and sucrose reduce pain in newborns during minor painful procedures, these interventions remain underutilized in practice. To address this knowledge-to-practice gap, we produced a five-minute parent-targeted video demonstrating the analgesic effects of these strategies and examined whether the use of newborn pain treatment increased in maternal-newborn care settings following the introduction of the video by nurses.

The design was a pre-post outcome evaluation. The participants were infants born in eight maternal-newborn hospital units in Ontario, Canada. Data on newborn pain treatment were obtained from a provincial birth registry. Descriptive statistics and chi square tests were used to compare the before-and-after changes in the use of pain treatment.

Data on 15,524 infants were included. Overall, there was an increase in the proportion of newborns receiving any pain treatment comparing before (49%) and after (54%) the video intervention (p < 0.0001) and a decrease in the proportion of newborns receiving no pain treatment pre- (17.6%) and post-intervention (11.5%) (p < 0.0001). Most of the change aligned with increased sucrose use (35% to 47%, p < 0.0001) in three of the larger units. Nevertheless, considerable increases in the use of breastfeeding and/or skin-to-skin care (24% to 38%, p < 0.0001) were also observed in three of the smaller units.

The video intervention was effective at increasing the use of pain treatment for newborns. Though the overall increases were modest, there were some large increases for specific methods of pain treatment in certain maternal-newborn units, reflecting the diversity in practice and context across different sites.