Helping Your Child with Pain
Introduction
This webpage is to inform parents about pain control in children and to encourage parents to be involved in their childs care.
Sometimes children are too sick or too afraid to say how much pain they have. Often at these times parents are the best judge of what the child is experiencing.
About Pain
Pain is a part of life. However, untreated pain may cause anxiety, depression, irritability and exhaustion. Pain can also cause problems with eating and sleeping and may slow healing. Uncontrolled pain may cause changes to the tissues and brain that can make future pain worse.
Managing Pain in Children
Everything possible should be done to prevent or minimise a childs pain. Needle pain can be prevented with a local anaesthetic cream to the skin. Some surgical pain can be avoided by giving an anaesthetic block at the time of surgery. Serious pain may require more than one treatment, this may include a combination of different medications given in different ways as well as psychological support.
Medication for Pain Control
Medications for acute pain control should be given regularly, such as every 4 hours. These medications should be used to keep pain away, not to ‘catch up’ with pain that is already severe. Medications may be given by mouth, into the intravenous drip, into the fatty subcutaneous tissue under the skin, or during surgery the first dose may be given rectally while the patient is under anaesthesia.
Pain control is more effective if 2 types of medication are combined, so when pain is at its worst, most children will have more than one pain medication given.
Can the Medications Cause Addiction?
No. Research shows that it is highly unlikely for addiction to occur with controlled short-term use of pain control medications.
What If My Child says He/She is Hurting?
Let the child know that you understand how he/she feels. Encourage the child to breath deep and steady in order to gain self-control. Sometimes play or distraction is a good way to keep the childs mind off their pain. If the pain continues to cause distress, call for the nurse.
What can I Do to Get the Best Results from the Pain Control for my Child?
Help the doctors and nurses to ‘measure’ your child's pain. Measuring pain helps staff to more effectively control the child's pain. Two ways of measuring pain are :
- what the child says, and
- what the child is doing.
Your child may be asked to point to the face on a ‘faces pain scale’ that looks like how they ‘feel’. This can show us how much the child is hurting.
Older children can be asked how much they hurt by rating their pain on a scale from zero to ten, zero being no pain and ten being the worst pain imaginable.
Some important points to remember:
- Tell the nurse if your child's pain is not well controlled
- Explain procedures to your child, slowly, in small bits, and as often as needed
- Do not lie to your child about painful events or use needles as threats
- Stroke, hold, rock, cuddle and/or massage your child to offer psychological support, these are nature's own pain remedies