Neonatal pain - Raising awareness?

[JoAndTheBoys]

I met up with my sister this morning, and it came up in conversation that she has just done a research project for Uni on Neonatal pain.

Having just had a baby (and just taken her for her first lot of injections this morning), I was interested in what the research was about.

She said that during her placements in various hospitals over the last 3 years, she was surprised to learn that when doing procedures on very young babies such as anal biopsies, they don't give them any pain relief beforehand such as aneasthetic (sp?) because the belief of the medical staff is that very young babies "don't feel pain". When watching these procedures being done, my sister said indeed the babies didn't seem to fuss too much.

The subject interested her so she undertook a research project on it for one of her assignments.

During her research, she discovered a LOT of evidence and other research to the contrary - that babies DO feel pain, and in fact the reason they don't fuss too much when having procedures done (including having operations such as when they are born with their intestines outside their body and have to have them put back in and the umbilicus stitched up) is because they can't cope with the pain and just 'shut down'. Research has also shown that they have negative effects from suffering pain as an very young infant when they're older.

I feel so disturbed that this appears to be normal practice in at least one large hospital that my sister was on her placement at. She said that parents generally just assume their babies will be having pain relief (well you would, wouldn't you?) and often don't want to know the finer details of what their child is having done as it upsets them, so they aren't aware of this.

My sister's tutor at Uni wants her to look into having her findings in the assignment published.

I feel like I want to do something to make this barbaric practice be exposed, but I'm not sure where to start. I just felt so upset and angry about it that I had to come on here and see if anyone knows where to start with it. I've not been on for a while but this was the first place I thought of.

As I'm reading back what I've wrote I'm still in disbelief that in this day and age this is happening.

I am horrified to hear this. I have never had to give the subject any thought, but would have assumed that the baby would have pain relief. This is shocking.

maybe u could ring your local hospital and ask their policy on pain relief in infants undergoing surgery?

Frankie3 - I know, I can't get it out of my head.

To be honest I could feel myself starting to get really choked talking about it so I didn't ask my sister too many more details than she'd already told me, but she did say she'd had difficulty getting anyone to talk about their specific policies after she'd spoken to the nurse during the anal biopsy.

She did speak to SCBU staff who said they were beginning to use sucrose for prem babies when they had to have injections, as this had been found to make a difference.

I don't understand why very young babies are thought to "not feel pain". I'm sure they must do as they have all their nerve endings etc, and they are also thought to be destressed when being born with ventouse. Do babies feel pain when they are being born?

i thought this was a totally discredited and disproved train of thought?????

are you saying that babies are having operations without aneasthesia?

i can definatley say that babies DO feel pain. having seen my dd1 have well over 100 lots of blood taken. various canula's and drips put into her body, most times unsucessfully, having major surgery done to correct a hole in her diapragm and put the organ back into the correct place, i know all of this first hand. these so called medical profesionals have obviously never had to hold down a week old baby while they shave her head and insert a canula into it all this while she squirms and sobs uncontrolably. this makes me feel sick to think they feel babies can go with anestetic(sp).........lets do major surgery on them without it and we will see.