Pain Assessment in Intubated Children During Intratracheal Suction

Abstract

Background: Critically ill children experience painful procedures. One of them is intratracheal suction. Aim: The aim of this study was the assessment of pain in intubated children during intratracheal suction. Methods: Data obtained from 58 patients who underwent 282 intratracheal suctions Data collection was performed with three pain scales, Comfort behavioral scale, VASobs scale and Hartwig scale. statistical analysis was done with SPSS 18.0 and statistical tests One-way Anova, t-test and Pearson correlation. Results: The analysis found no significant differences in pain intensity between boys and girls, p>0.05 It was also found that children younger than one year old felt more pain, according to the three assessments of Comfort b scale, p<0.001, p=0.023, p=0.001 and the first assessment of VASobs scale, p=0.007. Children of all ages who were intubated for 10 or more days felt more pain at all four assessments of Comfort b scale, p<0.001, p=0.003, p<0.001, p=0.007. The same results were found for the children who suffered from a disease associated with pain, p <0.001 and p=0.004, at the 1st and 3rd assessment of Comfort b and p=0.010 for Hartwig scale. There was not a significant difference in the total score of the three scales in relation to the duration of intratracheal suction, p>0.05. There was also, a positive correlation between the degree of pain, according to the total score of Comfort b and the number of heartbeats, p=0.010, p=0.005 and p=0.042 at the first three and the four measurements of breaths, p<0.001 Conclusions: Intratracheal suction is a painful procedure for the intubated children and pain intensity has a strong relation with age, the time of intubation, the kind of the disease and other clinical factors.