Knowledge and barriers of pain management in children among nurses in two selected referral hospitals, Rwanda.

Abstract

Background: Pain, distress, anxiety, agitation and fear are often experienced by children undergoing medical treatment(Beckman et al., 2017). When care provider miss to manage children‘s pain, this can lead to severe complications and it may lead to further deterioration of the children. It was revealed that (49–64%) of hospitalized children receives inadequate pain management despite the increase in knowledge and available treatments(Ortiz et al., 2015). Aim: The aim of this study was to determinine the knowledge and barriers of nurses regarding pain management in children. Method: A cross sectional and descriptive study was conducted involving 136 nurses working in pediatrics wards of University teaching Hospital of Kigali and Rwanda Military Hospital. The data was collected after obtaining oral and written informed consent from each participant. Confidentiality was maintained by excluding the name of participants from questionnaire. The beneficence was respected during the study process. a non-probability sampling technique to select the participants was used . A pre-tested self- administered and semi- structured questionnaire was used to collect the data. Data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences Study (SPSS) and descriptive statistics run on all the variables. The pilot study consisted of 10% of total population. The reliability of the questionnaire was determined using Cronbach’s alpha test . Ethical approval letters from College of Medicine and Health Sciences at University of Rwanda and research committee of University Teaching Hospital of Kigali(UTHK) and Rwanda military Hospital (RMH) have been granted .This study assessed the nurses ’knowledge and barriers towards pain management among children, in two selected referral hospitals in Rwanda which may limit the generalization of the findings to other referral hospitals in Rwanda . Results: Of the 102 questionnaires distributed, 102 (RR = 100 %) were returned and completed. Based on these findings of the current study, it was revealed that nurses had poor knowledge level as regard to pain management among children. Findings from this study demonstrated that 51.1% of respondents provided wrong answer about pain assessment in children while 56.9% of respondents provided correct answers about pain medication. The findings from this study indicate that there was low positive correlation (rho = 0.18, p=0.03) between nurses ’knowledge v towards pain management among children and gender where by being female working in pediatric department demonstrated good pain management among children. Conclusion and recommendation: In order to improve the quality of pain management among children in these hospitals, the hospital administration need to plan in-service training programs to enhance nurses’ knowledge towards pain management among children and to avail pain management policy and tools in place.