Nurses' experience of caring for burn injured children in pain.

Abstract: Aim: To illuminate how nurses working with burn injured children describe their care for burn injured children in pain during dressing procedures and which conditions and obstacles nurses express they are working under in order to proceed with giving care. Method: Semi-structured qualitative interviews with eight nurses at a pediatric burn ward in Dar es Salaam. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and processed by manifest content analysis. Result: Three themes were derived and identified as, pain assessment, pain management and pain treatment. Nurses experienced the pain management as satisfactory and expressed pain assessment as indication to how the burn injured children behaved and were affected upon daily dressing of burn wounds. Results also showed from observations that there is no specific pain assessment tool being used at the ward, more than the nurse’s clinical eye and work experience at the dressing occasion. The main pain treatment used at the ward was Panadol and nurses described their fear of children becoming tolerant to opiates as reason why Panadol being used so extensively. Conclusion: This is a topic that shows that nurses in dealing with pediatric burn injured patients have good skills in pain management. However the routine use of pain treatment during dressings as an extensive standard treatment needs to be illuminated