Nursing Assessment and Management of Pain in Infants

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience, even for infants who are incapable of reporting it verbally. Nurses are the medical professionals in the front line to witness the patient's suffering and pain, giving them greater responsibility to act upon their observations. The purpose of this thesis is to obtain and describe information from current literature to determine how a nurse can assess and manage pain in infants. The aim is to increase the authors’ knowledge on the subject and of those reading this review. The research methodology followed is a literature review, with inductive qualitative data analysis. Four databases were searched for data retrieval. These included CINAHL, Laurea FINNA, SAGE journals and PUBMED, resulting in a total of 22 articles selected. Our findings indicated that infant pain assessment tools can be broken down into either unidimensional or multidimensional. Unidimensional tools use a single indicator of pain assessment such as physiological or behavioral aspects. Multidimensional tools include both physiological and behavioral aspects. Research suggests that the most effective and accurate assessment tools are those which are unidimensional or behavioral in nature. More specifically, pain assessment tools using facial expressions as a determining factor of pain are most indicated for use on infants. Our findings also show that pain management in infants relies on a combination of pharmacological and non-pharmacological methods. In conclusion, neonatal nurses must first prevent pain whenever possible, secondly, they must assess pain in their neonatal patients who cannot verbalize their experienced pain, and thirdly, they must provide relief or reduction of pain through the implementation of non-pharmacological and/or pharmacological measures. Lastly, they must assist the infant in coping when pain cannot be prevented