◄Previous: 3.2 Improving the communication between parents/carers and nurses

# 4 Bringing everyone’s views together

In this final section of the course, you will focus on bringing the views of nurses and parents/carers together and create actions for each to take to help build trust and improve the management of a child’s pain whilst in hospital.

Figure 6 Reducing a child’s level of pain is the target for everyone

Based on parent and nurse feedback (Simons et al., 2024; Simons and Plowright Pepper, 2024) the following are suggested as actions to take:

## Nurses should:

- start the day by giving the parent/carer their name
- identify pain management at the start of a shift as a priority
- provide parents/carers with information about how their child’s pain will be managed
- give information to parents/carers gradually to help them take it in
- assess the child’s pain level regularly.

## Parents/carers should:

- approach any nurse for help when their child is in pain and not necessarily their child’s assigned nurse who may be unavailable
- build up a relationship with the nurse looking after their child, go to the nurse at any time if they have a concern and not wait if their child is in pain
- ask questions and know that they ‘are not being a nuisance’ and ‘there are no silly questions’
- trust the nurses and doctors to help when their child has pain.

For parents/carers, parent/carer empowerment is strongly dependent on the relationship the parent/carer has with the nurse. Having parents/carers and nurses work together as a team is in the best interests of the child in pain.

## Activity 4 PAIN mnemonic

This activity should take approximately 10 minutes

Watch this short animation for nurses and answer the following questions:

1. How useful is the PAIN mnemonic for nurses to help improve the management of children’s pain in hospital?
2. If you were given responsibility for sharing it with parents/carers, what method would you use and why?
3. What difference would each of the four sections of the mnemonic (PAIN) make to parents/carers?

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Animation 3
Transcript
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### Discussion

Many studies have found a longstanding problem in how nurses and parents/carers communicate in relation to children’s pain. By consciously working together to communicate better, by nurses being proactive in their communication about pain, and by parents/carers feeling more confident in approaching a nurse when their child is in pain, there is a greater likelihood of preventing children in hospital experiencing unnecessary pain.

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OpenLearn - Promoting the effective management of children’s pain – part 2
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