Evaluation of the nurses’ problems in using methods to reduce injection pain in children

Abstract

Background: Pain control is main concern in improving quality of medical care in children. Injection is one of painful procedures done on child in hospital. The goal of this research was to evaluate problems nurses encounter in using methods to reduce injection pain in children. Methods: The present study is a descriptive-analytic done with cooperation of 30 nurses working in pediatric units of two hospitals of Tehran city with a job experience of at least three months. The instrument used in this study included two questionnaires: 1) Demographic information, 2) Nurses’ view about existent obstacles in using methods of reducing injection pain in children. Findings: 100% of study samples were female and held a BS degree in nursing. They aged between 22-24 and more than 80% of them had more than one year of experience in pediatric department. The results obtained through questionnaire on nurse’ view about existent obstacles in using methods of reducing injection pain in children, show that in personal-management dimension “the lack of time and unproportional number of nurses to number of patients”, in educational dimension “the unavailability of pain measurement instruments”, in environmental-equipment dimension the lack of enough toys and entertainment to use injection pain reducing methods to children” and finally in motivational dimension ”the undue satisfaction of nurses regarding working hours and shifts”, have been named as number-one problems. Conclusions: results of present study show that in using methods to reduce injection pain in children, nurses face different problems in different aspects. The analysis of data of present study indicates that most salient solution to remove this problem is to form pain-control nurse committees in hospital.