The effects of mother’s voice on pain and physiological indices
Pain is an unpleasant and emotional experience with probable or actual damage to the tissue. Despite the fact that pain control is a key responsibility of health teams, fulfilling it in children is faced with several challenges.
Pain control in children is not limited to ensure comfort in children as a frequent and long-term experience of pain can create short/long-term side-effects in children. Among the short-term side-effects of pain are an increase in heartbeat and respiration rate, restlessness, and increase of blood pressure. Loss of appetite, insomnia, malnutrition, night terrors, intensification of symptoms, and even death are also notable (Evans et al., 2017).
Pain management in children is also essential to avoid long-term psychological and physiological side-effects of pain. Pain control is one of the main factors in nursing cares for children. It appears however, that children in PICUs suffer unbearable levels of pain frequently. Depending on the hospitalization term, these children experience 2-25 painful procedures (13 procedures on average) per day (Baarslag et al., 2018). The frequency and severity of the painful procedures increase as the physical and hemodynamic conditions of the paints becomes worse (Ramelet et al., 2004, Santos et al., 2018).
Among the standard therapeutic procedures, blood sampling is one of the pain sources in children (Rezai et al., 2017). Arterial blood sampling is among the most painful diagnostic procedures known, which is mostly done without any pain alleviation measure (Ballesteros-Pana et al., 2018). The results of a study on 100 patients in ICUs showed that this procedure is one of the main concerns of them so that they found the pain special and different from other types of pains (Hudson et al., 2006).
Children are not able to predict pain or demonstrate and describe pain as adults. In most of the cases, they do not understand the cause of pain (Ramelet et al., 2004; Ballesteros-Pena et al., 2018). This is a major challenge for pain control in children. One may say that the most effective way to alleviate control is to minimize and limit painful procedures, which of course is not possible always. The challenging task of detecting pain in children, the large number of medicines used in PICUs and the concerns of the interaction with pain killers, special physical and physiological condition of children, the concerns about the effects of painkillers on liver-renal condition in children, concentration on treatment and paying less attention to the pain caused by diagnostic procedure are some of the issues affecting pain control measures in children during diagnostic procedures like arterial blood sampling (Ismail, 2016).