Pediatric Pain Management Case Study

Furthermore, less than half of health care providers (47%) admitted that there was no preparation in their respective health care training programs in regard to IV line insertion and pain management. Half of the health care providers (50%) rated themselves “good” at IV line insertion skill. The majority (95%) reported that continuous professional development on comforting strategies for pediatric pain management was necessary (Table 3).
3.3 Perceived barriers to implementing comforting strategies for pain management during IV line insertion procedure
A number of barriers that affected implementation of comforting strategies for pain management during IV line insertion procedures in children were identified by the participating health care providers. The majority of the participating health care providers identified lack of time for implementation the strategies (42%), having an emergency situation and encounter (18%), and irritability of children (13%) as barriers that affected their ability to implement comforting strategies during IV line insertion. Additionally, health care providers identified; not knowing the right method to use (11%) as a barrier to implementing comforting strategies for pain management (Figure 1). Other barriers identified included; age, work overload, not expecting children to get much pain, lack of distractive materials at the facility as well as not thinking that it was important to control pain in this vulnerable
Discussion
Generally, pediatric pain management remains a huge challenge to all health care providers in primary, tertiary, acute and other health care settings in Uganda. It is even more challenging for low resource settings such as Mulago hospital where pain management seems not a fundamental right for all patients regardless of the available resources. For this reason, the WHO continues to emphasize pain management as a fundamental right regardless of age, culture, race, ethnicity and socio economic status [5,