#78. Remodeling Pediatric Pain Management in the Emergency Rooms

Sep 1, 2021

When the gold standard for pain assessment is verbal report, children's pain assessment and management requires specific knowledge and understanding.  Children at these important stages of growth create key memories-- and the last thing we need is a whole generation of children that associate getting medical attention with pain.

 

Globally, when children come in to the emergency room, pain is a component of their presentation 50 to 80% of the time. As medical practitioners, prioritizing the critical elements of a child’s illness should be the main concern-- but we also must ease their pain and suffering related to their health condition and prioritize minimizing their procedural pain.

 

In this episode, Samina Ali, MD, a pediatric emergency medicine physician and pain expert at the Stollery Children’s Hospital and University of Alberta, Canada shares her clinical and research experience in pediatric pain. Realizing that emergency room visits and procedures may have just as much capability to distress and traumatize a child beyond their presenting condition, she has dedicated her work to researching how she and fellow medical practitioners can make children and their families feel safe and empowered through institutional culture change as well as effective knowledge translation and mobilization.  

 

In creating an ER or any healthcare setting that caters to patient comfortability beyond just treating symptoms and illnesses, we can harbor a safer and more welcoming environment which can improve children’s experiences with receiving medical care, minimizing anxiety for future encounters, improving quality, safety, efficiency of and satisfaction with the work healthcare professionals perform.

 

Takeaways In This Episode

 

• What motivated Dr. Samina to research pediatric pain and implement effective pain prevention and treatment strategies.
• Common pain presentation in the emergency department and how it may impact the work.
• Top reasons why pediatric pain may not get the needed priority and how practitioners handle competing priorities among patients in the emergency room
• What the big leap of faith in pediatric healthcare is and how that affects pediatric pain.
• Successful approaches she has spearheaded  within her institution and beyond for better pediatric pain care
• Helpful steps to help other practitioners engage in pain care efforts 
• Factors that result in or lead to disparities in pediatric pain care
• The two main benefits of prioritizing pediatric pain care
• Her view on advanced technology-based interventions and their roles
• The common barriers in emergency rooms and how can they be addressed
• Engaging administration to facilitate a top-down approach
• Leveraging patients and their families voices to invoke change
• Dr. Samina Ali’s message to the listeners

 

Connect with Dr. Samina Ali:

 

Website

Twitter

 

Links

 

Ep 64: Prevention and Management of Procedural and Needle Pain and Anxiety Among Children

Solutions for Kids in Pain (SKIP)

Translating Emergency Knowledge for Kids - Procedural Pain

Translating Emergency Knowledge for Kids - Pain Treatment

Commitment to Comfort

Clinicians’ Pain Evaluation Toolkit

Proactive Pain Solutions

 

About the Guest

 

Samina Ali, MD

 

She is a professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. She is also the research director at Pediatric Emergency Department Medicine. She holds provincial and national funding for the study of children's acute care and emergencies and pain in the country and supervises many learners with both clinical and research backgrounds.

She has served as the director for pediatric emergency medicine from 2003-2008 and again, from 2010-2013. She was also the Director of Professionalism for the University of Alberta from 2010-2013, and also serves as the Assistant Dean for Professionalism for the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry.

As a practicing pediatric emergency physician, she is witness to the pain children experience from illnesses, injuries, and emergency room procedures. She has created a research program focused on improving children's pain and distress, mainly related to emergency department visits and procedures, and she shares many of those ways to improve pain experiences for the children, both in the hospital and in the community. In addition, she has been recently involved in the Canadian large effort for knowledge mobilization and knowledge translation in relation to her efforts in alleviating children’s distress and empower them and their families.