Neugeborenen- und Kindermedizin

Abstrakt

Critique of the Use of Neonatal Infant Pain Scale (NIPS)

Hala Obiedat and Effat Ibrahim Al-Maaitah

Background: Pain is a subjective phenomenon, difficult to quantify and qualify, especially on neonates who are unable to self-report their pain which are gold standard of pain measurement in other age groups. The need for a pain measure is a clinically important for guiding pain management practices and evaluating the effectiveness of a particular intervention. Pain assessment tools have been developed and validated, but they are rarely used because they are too complicated.

Purpose: The aim of this integrative literature review was to critique the studies related of the use of Neonatal Infant Pain Scale (NIPS) to measure the pain as the fifth vital sign.

Method: Electronic searches were conducted using the following database: CINAHL, Science Direct, Pub Med and EBSCO. The search generated 40 articles; 30articles fit to the criteria of the integrative literature review.

Result: Neonatal Infant Pain Scale is multidimensional tool with sufficient psychometric prosperities because it had excellent inter rater reliability, concurrent validity, construct validity and predictive validity which should be essential for accurate assessment and appropriate interventions.

Conclusion: This review suggests implementing the NIPS scale as valid reliable tool to monitor pain routinely in the clinical practice, because it’s easily applied in comparison with other pain assessment tools.