Taking blood, starting an IV or looking in the ear; Even seemingly simple medical procedures can cause anxiety, pain and stress in children. According to pediatric intensivist Piet Leroy, comfort and trust are just as important as the medical treatment itself. He therefore investigates how healthcare providers can provide trauma-free care and how healthcare providers can learn to apply comfort care. Leroy has been appointed professor of ‘procedural comfort care, sedation and analgesia in children for trauma-free care’, and will speak on March 8 inaugural speech out.
Pain and fear are inevitable with illness and treatment, but for children these emotions can be amplified by medical procedures. That’s called procedural suffering. “A sick child does not understand why an examination or treatment is necessary and will resist,” Leroy explains. ‘We quickly move on, because healthcare providers want to properly examine and treat the child. But being restrained once to look in the ears can be a very unpleasant experience for a child who will remember it.’ The experience of procedural distress by young children not only has direct consequences, such as additional pain and anxiety at that moment, but it can hinder healing and cause distrust towards healthcare providers.
Accumulation
Since his early years as a pediatrician, Leroy has been concerned with reducing procedural suffering. Initially by putting children into deep sleep for procedures that are clearly very painful or annoying, so that they do not consciously experience them. Later, a personal experience led to a shift towards procedural comfort – even for actions that objectively do not hurt much. ‘My daughter survived a serious illness thanks to good medical care. But six months after her treatment, she panicked completely when the playgroup teacher wanted to give her a plaster: she received a plaster in the hospital after every injection. The psychological impact of the accumulation of small actions lasted a few years.’ Leroy then devised solutions for practice, conducted research, wrote guidelines, set up a knowledge center and now holds a chair. “My daughter always says that I was able to have a career thanks to her,” laughs Leroy.
Comfortzorg
No medical technology, but the relationship with the child and the parents forms the basis of comfort care. ‘There are plenty of relatively simple solutions that can go a long way. For example, children at Maastricht UMC+ receive anesthetic ointment with almost every injection. But the ointment only takes away the pain; not the fear. To do this, we need to make contact with the child and, together with the parents, find out what is going on in the child. Is it reassuring to first let the child experience that the skin does indeed feel different when numbed than it did last time? Or are we going to distract the child so that he does not notice what is happening with that needle? The technique of comfort care is not in the anesthetic ointment, but in using the right words, learning to distract, learning to include a child in what you are going to do. And to find out anew for each child what offers comfort and confidence.’
2024-03-07 15:36:07
#Traumafree #care #sick #children
