Non-pharmacological Methods in Pain Managment During Heel Stick in Preterm Infants

Aim: Due to the necessity of various painful procedures and their side effects on infants, pharmacological and non-pharmacological methods are adopted to reduce the pain. Since pharmacological methods can be associated with several side effects, it is better to use non-pharmacological methods for pain control in newborns. Therefore, the purposes of this study were to compare the effects of three different methods (including Non-nutritive sucking, breast milk odor, and Facilitated tucking) on preterm infant pain before, during, and after heel-stick procedures. Method: The study was conducted on 144 premature infants with a gestational age of 31 to 36 weeks and 6 days hospitalized in the neonatal intensive care unit of Shahid Sayad Shirazi Hospital, Iran. Initially, neonates are divided into two groups according to gestational age (including neonates between 31-33 weeks and 34-36 weeks) to moderate the confounding effect of the age, and then the allocation of neonates to four groups was performed. Using the stratification block randomization method, 36 babies were included in the Non-nutritive sucking(1st Group), 36 in breast milk odor (2nd Group), 36 in Facilitated tucking (3rd Group), and 36 in the control group (4th Group). Two researchers viewed the recorded videos independently and evaluate the heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, and neonatal pain at 1st,2nd,3rd minute before the procedure, during, and at 1st,2nd,3rd minutes after the procedure according to the Premature Infant Pain Profile (PIPP).