Sadly, over the last 20 years, needle phobia has drastically increased; with one in four people suffering from the fear of needles. Perhaps more worryingly, it is believed one in 10 people will avoid vaccinations or needle procedures entirely, due to a fear of needles. This presents a significant challenge for the medical professionals whose job it is to protect us from serious, sometimes life-threatening illnesses.
Like many fears, needle phobia often originates from negative experiences in our childhood. Which is why it is so important that we do everything we can to make vaccinations as comfortable and stress-free as possible.
THE CREATION OF BUZZY BEE
It was through personal experience of taking her own son for his routine vaccinations, that Dr Amy Baxter came up with the idea of Buzzy Bee; a playful and effective pain management tool, specifically designed to give children a positive experience when receiving those all-important vaccinations.
As a medical professional, Dr Baxter was convinced of the need to protect her son from diseases and illness such as measles, mumps, rubella and polio. However, as a mum, she felt ill-equipped to protect him from the traumatic experience of being injected.
Baxter reflects on the irony, “Every time we had to go to the doctor, my son would get physically ill. There I was, a paediatric physician and pain specialist, and I couldn’t even protect my own kid. What were other parents going to do?”
Motivated on both a professional and personal level, Dr Baxter spent time researching solutions for reducing the pain and anxiety experienced during childhood vaccinations. As injections and the use of needles play a vital part in modern medical care, she wanted to equip both parents and medical practitioners with a tangible tool that would stop children from developing a fear of needles.
The results of Dr Baxter’s research were the creation of Buzzy Bee, a small vibrating bee with cooling ice-pack wings that, along with other proven pain management techniques, can help reduce injection pain by up to 80%.
TEN TIPS FOR REDUCING THE PAIN OF VACCINATIONS
So, what are the techniques you can use to help children through uncomfortable procedures? How can Buzzy Bee help?
Here are our top ten tips for reducing pain and fear during vaccinations.
As it is the parent’s responsibility to bring their children in for immunisations, empowering them to play their part during the procedure is going to lay the foundations for success. Any information given to them prior to the appointment, that outlines the procedure and what they can do to help their children have the best experience possible, will mean they arrive confident and calm.
Research shows that breastfeeding can have analgesic effects. Essentially, the physical connection to their mother, the act of sucking and the sweet-tasting milk all help to reduce pain for the baby. For best results, the breastfeeding mother should start breastfeeding before the procedure and continue during and after the injections.
For infants up to 12 months, who are not breastfed, a sucrose solution given 1-2 minutes before the injections, also has the potential to give pain relief. One approach to preparing a sucrose solution is to mix one packet or cube of sugar with 10 ml (two teaspoons) of water in a medicine cup. Alternatively, sucrose solutions can be obtained from some pharmacies. Again, if the parent or caregiver bringing the child to the appointment is given this information ahead of time, they can come prepared.
Building up trust with patients is very much on the agenda, so lying to a child and telling them it won’t hurt is not recommended. It may keep them calm before the first injection, but the inevitable pain will then come as a shock and the patient will have learnt that medical professionals aren’t honest with them. Equally, parents should be encouraged to be honest with their child for the same reason. The truth is, it will hurt a bit; but it’s also true that it’s over quickly.
Once the child and accompanying grown up arrives in the room, it’s important to put them at ease. This is your patch, and you are in control. A friendly and happy medical professional will affirm the thought that this is nothing to worry about and certainly nothing to be fearful of.
Introducing Buzzy Bee to the young patient, gives you an opportunity to engage them in conversation and create a rapport with them.
Sometimes, children will be receiving more than one injection during their appointment, and some vaccinations are more painful than others. Plus, pain increases with every injection. Studies have shown that, when multiple injections are required, giving the most painful injection last will decrease the overall pain from both injections.
Research shows that infants and children sitting up during injections is better for management of pain. Depending on the age and size of the child, helping them to get in a comfortable position whilst their parents hold them will mean the health practitioner is able to focus on giving speedy and successful injections.
As they are settling themselves on their parent’s lap, you can help attach Buzzy Bee near to the injection area. For best results, Buzzy should be put into position 30—60 seconds before the injection.
Buzzy uses a combination of cold and vibration to replace pain with temperature and movement. Buzzy confuses the body’s nerves and distracts attention away from the pain, thereby dulling or eliminating sharp injection pain.
We all know the pain is real, but it’s fleeting and distraction away from the procedure can make it feel like it was over in a second. Studies show that when parents focus on subjects that aren’t connected to the injection and try to make the child laugh, it’s far more effective than when they sympathise and console. When Buzzy is combined with a distraction technique such as Buzzy Distraction Cards, research indicates pain and fear are even further reduced.
With older children and teenagers, audio or visual devices provide effective distraction. This is one of those rare times when they should be encouraged to play on their phone.
Why not put together a distraction kit for your clinic, including: a Buzzy Bee, distraction cards, pop-up books, bubbles, pinwheels and party blowers.
Slow, deep breathing exercises not only work as a relaxation strategy, if facilitated by toys or activities, for example blowing bubbles, blowing a pinwheel or party blowers, they also serve as a distraction by focusing attention away from the procedure.
Show the child how to “tummy breath”, taking a deep breath in and then blowing it out slowly. Keep coaching the child to breathe deeply during the procedure.
LASTING MEMORIES
Once the injections are done, lots of praise will go a long way. Positive affirmation as the last part of the procedure is a great way to end.
By using a combination of these top ten tips for pain reduction, patients will remember the needle pain as only a small part of the procedure. With any luck, the lasting memories of immunisations taken into adulthood will be of Buzzy Bees and funny conversations.
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Imagine hitting your hand with a hammer. Since the discovery of the nerve, pain has been portrayed as an impulse traveling from hand to head, with concrete implications: if you can stop the transmission in the hand, as with anesthetic, there is no pain.
If you can block pain in the spine, the brain is blissfully unaware. And most recently, if a medicine blurs the reception of pain in the brain, the problem is solved. Pain is an alarm system that can be short-circuited.
New MRI studies have changed the way we understand noxious stimuli, such as tissue injury and temperature extremes. Instead of an all-or-none pain bolus from the periphery in a tidy 0-10 rating, pain is a nuanced interpretation of both the stimulus and the context.
Being knocked to the ground in an attack can be a terrifying, painful experience. When you’ve just caught a rugby ball and you’re tackled on the try line, pain is irrelevant. When a child is awaiting their third injection, the screaming may begin with a quick swipe of an alcohol wipe.
New theories of pain have recast the nature of the sensation itself. The notion that “Pain is the brain’s opinion of how safe it is” maintains the alarm system metaphor, adding the nuance that alarms can be muted. The idea that “Pain is an emotion” elevates the brain’s role in mitigating pain, and acknowledges that it’s quite real while underscoring the factors that make emotions stronger: fatigue, hunger, fear, repetition.
Putting these concepts together allows for clinical advances and hope for those with chronic pain. Pain Care Labs’ believe that modern pain management should address physiology, fear and focus.
There are four touch receptors – light touch, deep pressure, position sense, and
stretching. Researchers used to think that any of these “mechanoreceptors” sensations would outrace pain to the spine to shut it out. Our “Gate Control” understanding has grown more sophisticated. When someone smashes their thumb with a hammer, light stroking doesn’t help. Instead, vigorous shaking does the trick, and we now know the frequencies to mimic position sense Pacinian nerves.
Previous pain research concentrated on measuring pain often, with the unfortunate side effect of drawing attention to injury or disability. Just as your hearing becomes more acute concentrating on the sound of a possible intruder, focusing on pain enhances the sensation.
Instead, new therapies like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focus on making movement and activity goals. By gauging success on enjoyment goals, pain is lessened more than it is when using traditional pharmaceutical protocols.
With acute pain, activating the executive function (anterior cingulate cortex) diminishes the perception of pain. Simple visual counting tasks, such as using Distraction Cards or virtual reality are equally effective: the important components are rapid task resolution, visual engagement, and matching tasks. The next time you get a vaccine, concentrate on any sentence and count the number of letters with a hole in them. “It’s going to be fine” has seven.
If you’ve heard of the amygdala, it may be in the context of anger or fear. MRI studies show that pain lights up the amygdala like a beacon. When the brain is trying to assess safety, it makes sense that putting fear on high alert would increase pain perception.
What may not be as intuitive is that control is the natural counterbalance of fear. When a person knows they have a pain reliever in the other room, they can tolerate pain longer. Suffering pain becomes a choice, allowing them to decide when the annoyance outweighs the effort to obtain relief. We have a choice, is it worth the effort to remove myself from the couch and find Panadol in the first aid kit?
Chronic pain patients say over and over that they want options – what they want is some control and hope to smother fear. With chronic pain, areas of the brain involved in meaning also light up to ask questions, such as:
“Will I always be like this?”
“What if I can’t stand it and sneak a pain pill early, what does that mean?”
“Is it supposed to hurt this much?”
“Is it damaged?”
By giving patients options, letting them know when to expect maximal pain, and with therapeutics they control (hot, cold, intensity, position) the amygdala can stand down and pain is reduced.
There is only so much a pain pill can do. By teaching patient's tools, using empowering multimodal solutions, balancing expectations, and putting the focus on activity, we’re translating research into great patient care.
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When former pediatric emergency physician Dr. Amy Baxter was in medical school, she said at the start of her talk at TED2023, there were only about two days dedicated to pain education. And the lecture “was sponsored by OxyContin,” Baxter quipped. Still, she learned the basics: That pain is an alarm carried by nerves, to our spines, which is translated to our brains, where the sensation of pain registers in the body.
But Baxter believes we’ve been looking at it all wrong.
“What if pain isn’t an alarm to silence, but a learning system for survival?” she asked.
What if we were to reframe the goal of pain management from being pain-free to instead being more comfortable?
That pain-free model is what has led to the overwhelming and dangerous use of opioids — and a world where 80,000 Americans died of an opioid overdoes last year, and 80% of substance use disorders start with drugs that were prescribed for treating pain.
By the way, Baxter was sure to remind the TED audience, those opioids don’t always treat pain, so much as they turn on our reward system, allowing us to feel pain but not really care because these drugs are making us feel so good. (That’s not to say they should never be used, but Baxter is on a mission to provide more pain management options.)
So, how do we realign towards a goal of more drug-free pain tolerance — rather than a goal of pain removal with addictive opioids?
Baxter’s answer is simple: Cold and vibration.
Baxter’s eureka moment happened when she was experiencing some pain of her own. As her hand went numb, and her husband grabbed a bag of frozen peas, she named the two things that blocked her pain: Cold and vibration.
The revelation was so profound that Baxter left traditional medicine to pursue her work at Pain Care Labs, where she pioneers drug-free pain solutions, like Buzzy.
Buzzy is a device (shaped like an adorable bumble bee) that includes a small vibrational component with two ice pack “wings.” It was originally designed for children who have a fear of needles to get injections and procedures with less pain and anxiety.
Since her initial research, development, and patent, 45 million needle procedures have decreased pain, and over 80 randomized controlled trials have been published in support of her work.
Baxter explained like any great pediatrician would: Vibration decreases pain because things like light touch, stretch, slight pressure, and motion all race pain to the spine and attempt to shut the gate on sharp pain.
It turns out, motion (like vibration) is most effective in shutting that gate; the exact right frequency of vibration can trigger the nerves that decrease pain.
Ice, on the other hand, allows for those sensations of cold to go to the brain, where it essentially says, “Oh, this sensation is obnoxious, but it’s not dangerous. I will decrease sensations coming from everywhere.”
This discovery is one Baxter is currently using to create a low back pain device to reduce opioid use — and she’s confident it can work.
In fact, one of Baxter’s colleagues confided that he was in opioid recovery but was about to undergo a knee replacement surgery. He posed a question to Baxter: Could he get through his surgery recovery completely drug-free with the use of just cold and vibration?
“He did it,” Baxter said. “Vibration plus cold replaced OxyContin.”
This success is a delicate balance of confronting fear, maintaining control, and working with physiology.
The sensations from Buzzy are helpful, but folks with big fears of needles or large amounts of pain might also need the help of distraction. Along with the device, Baxter’s team developed a poster with monkeys on it that required counting and decision-making — and it cut pain in half.
Lots of distracting and decision-making exercises can be employed in these situations, allowing people in pain to regain control of what’s going on in their brains.
“Pain is a symphony of connections,” Baxter explained. “From the sensation area, to the conductor, to the decision switchboard — and then to fear, memory, meaning, control. If the decision switchboard is too busy counting monkeys, it can’t notify fear and meaning, and you feel less pain.”
Context is also important. It’s why getting a tattoo might not be as scary as getting a shot, or why tickling yourself doesn’t work the same way as someone else tickling you.
These approaches are personal, Baxter said, and give us the opportunity to layer physiological options (like heat, cold, vibration, exercise, or deep breathing) to feel in control.
“St. Augustine called pain the greatest of evil, but if it is a survival system, it cannot be all evil,” Baxter said. “Instead, think of pain as your nagging, safety-obsessed, exaggerating friend who is sometimes wrong. It’s okay to override or ignore your friend if you know you’re safe.”
All in all, Baxter’s research continues to find drug-free pain solutions for people of all kinds — but her work at Pain Care Labs has already led to an enormous library of resources. From extensive guides on coping with needle phobias, to case studies in children's hospital, and expertise on opioid alternatives, Baxter envisions a future where pain is completely reframed.
“Power over pain isn’t always pretty,” she said, “But it is possible, and it is absolutely critical.”
CREDIT: https://www.goodgoodgood.co/
For children having their first medical procedure, we want it to be a positive, reassuring experience. For children undertaking a journey of ongoing procedures, we want things to be as stress-free and comfortable as possible.
So whether you're a nurse or play specialist working with littlies, or a parent of a child who needs ongoing medical treatments, we've come up with 20 great tools to reduce fear & anxiety during medical procedures.
Put together your Distraction Toolkit now:
1. Finger Puppets
2. Colouring in and/or art supplies
3. Lego
4. Bubble liquid and bubble wand
7. Wooden blocks
8. Stickers
9. Stress Balls
10. Windmill
11. Lollypops
12. Dress Ups - red nose, hat, mask
13. Where's Wally books
14. Slinky
15. Fidget Spinners
16. Soft Toys
17. Rubik's Cubes
18. Liquid In-Motion Toy
19. Headphones & Device
20. Pop-Up Books
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Speaking from first-hand experience working in the paediatric perioperative unit at Duke Children’s Hospital, nurses were advocates of promoting the use of Buzzy for IV placements. Though freeze spray was a useful pain management option, it often constricted patients’ already small veins, while Buzzy did not contribute to any challenges of successfully placing an IV. This made Buzzy a reliable pain relief option to present to all patients. Younger children are often amused and enjoy playing with "Buzzy bee" before and after the injection, and older children and teens are usually intrigued by the way Buzzy works.
Buzzy is a small, palm-sized “bee” device that uses the right frequency vibration and cold from its frozen wings to control nearby pain. For optimal pain control, the frozen wings will be attached to the Buzzy device, which will then be turned on and placed on the site of the injection for 30-60 seconds. When time for the injection or IV placement, Buzzy will then be moved above the injection site. This allows the Buzzy device to be placed between the pain and the brain.
Buzzy uses the natural “gate control” pain relief by confusing the body’s nerves, which dulls or eliminates sharp pain. When the nerves receive the non-painful signals of cold and/or vibration, the brain closes the gate on pain signals. Buzzy is also designed to help when the device is placed distant from the site of procedural pain, which is called Descending Noxious Inhibitory Control (DNIC). This allows the brain to dampen out unwanted signals. When the brain notices the cold sensation from Buzzy’s frozen wings, it activates a supraspinal modulation that raises the body’s overall pain threshold.
Buzzy is available for personal use as well as for use in the healthcare setting. Buzzy is trusted and used in over five thousand hospitals and clinics worldwide. It is used in place of topical anaesthetics and is ten times faster and four times more economical. Buzzy is the most economical pain management device that is clinically proven to improve satisfaction and provide the fastest pain relief for children and adults alike. As child life specialists, we love having the Buzzy device as a part of our go-to procedural preparation, support, and pain management toolboxes!
Credit: Hearts Connected | Heather Eudy,BS Jul 29, 2021]]>
Our vaccination providers are doing an outstanding job and many are putting in every effort to ensure that the vaccination procedure is not traumatic for the child. We know that if the first shot goes smoothly, with minimal pain, the second shot will be easier. Children with special needs such as sensory issues need extra special care and support through their procedure.
To help make the vaccination process as stress-free as possible for our children, here's some tips and tricks:
For more information about Buzzy and distraction methods, read our other blogs.
]]>It makes sense that being held tightly and subjected to a painful injection could have a lifelong impact on complying with health care. When I tried to use numbing creams, one nurse said “that stuff doesn’t work, they need to get used to it”, and gave the injection outside the numb zone! I got mad at the system and myself. If I couldn’t protect my child and I’m part of the system, what parent could?
I wanted to come up with something that worked instantly that parents and patients with established needle phobia could bring and use even if the healthcare system wasn’t interested.
I knew that the body could stop pain naturally using something called “gate theory”. If you bang your knee and rub it the pain stops, if you smash your finger and shake it, it helps the pain, or if you burn your finger and stick it under cold running water it quits hurting.
I thought of cuffs of cold water, all sorts of messy stuff. Driving home from the hospital one day it occurred to me that vibration would block pain, but it wasn’t until my husband suggested frozen peas UNDER the vibration that it really made my kids’ hands numb to sharp pokes. And Buzzy was conceived.
Buzzy uses natural pain relief by confusing your body’s own nerves and distracting attention away from the injection, thereby dulling or eliminating sharp pain. Over the past 5 years my children helped test, build, and prototype Buzzy until we had a device that worked. They smashed cell phones, helped me use electric tape and elastic bands, and have served as my first and best advisors. We started with a hand held massager and frozen peas, and finally got to a cute bee with frozen wings.
From a scientific standpoint, I didn’t want to put it out there unless I knew it worked for other people as well as my kids. The Mayday Fund, a non-profit dedicated to the reduction of pain and suffering, sponsored Georgia State to do a research study in adult volunteers getting IVs inserted. Buzzy significantly decreased pain, and was more effective the more anxiety people already had. A trial in children needing IV starts in the emergency department also showed significantly decreased pain by child and parent report, and even increased IV success threefold. On the basis of this, we got a $1M grant from the National Institutes of Health to study whether Buzzy reduces the pain of immunizations, and hopefully can avoid the development of needle phobia.
How important is this?? Although needle pain from an injection may not seem like a big deal, needle sticks are the most common and most feared cause of medical pain in the world. Blood donation, preventative health care, and diagnosing serious illnesses like cancer are all impacted by fearing doctors and needles. Conversely, awareness and use of available pain control methods for children can result in years of improved health. Buzzy is now being used for dentistry, travel immunisations, fertility shots, and finger pricks, splinter removal, and flu injections! We’ve heard from parents who had considered stopping more effective injected or IV treatments due to needle fear who are now able to give their kids the best treatment due to Buzzy. We’ve even heard from kids… stories and letters that remind us that Needle Pain Matters…and because of that, so does Buzzy.
- Dr Amy Baxter, Buzzy Inventor
]]>With the COVID vaccine roll out on its way to Australia and New Zealand, a successful uptake will depend on a variety of factors, one of which is vaccine acceptance. One potential hurdle to the number of adults getting the vaccine is needle fear.
If you’re scared of needles, but you want to be vaccinated here are some tools and techniques to help you cope.
Distract the nerves
Use a vibrating Buzzy to help block the pain and provide distraction. Place the Buzzy with the frozen ice-wings on the injection site for 60 seconds prior to the shot. Then move Buzzy up the arm with the vibration still switched on.
Relax the muscles
Easier said than done, but pushing medication into taut muscles makes it hurt more at the time of an injection and after. Try and relax your muscles.
Distract your mind
Counting and finding tasks can reduce pain by half. Count corners in the room, count ceiling tiles, count holes in the air grate.
Distract the senses
The brain can process only so much at one time, so stimulate taste and smell to decrease pain. Immediately before the shot, suck on a sweet lolly, chew a stick of gum or breathe in some peppermint oil on a tissue.
More information about Buzzy https://www.buzzy4shots.com.au/products/buzzy-home-use-basic-kit
]]>Amy Baxter, an emergency pediatrician in Atlanta, created a high-frequency vibrating ice pack that helps disrupt pain signals on their way to the brain. She stuck a cute striped bee on the front, won a grant from the National Institutes of Health, and the product now known as Buzzy was born.
Baxter's first prototype was a bag of frozen peas and an electronic fitness massager, whose black and yellow color scheme survives today.
She had originally used it just on patients at the hospital where she worked, and on her son, who was finally able to face his fear of shots with Buzzy by his side. But she was anxious to share her solution with other kids.
"Every time I saw a child being held down ... I felt guilty," she says. "I felt like I should run in there with the Buzzy prototype I had in my pocket."
The device operates on a pain theory called gate control. Researchers in the 1960s speculated that some kinds of sensory stimulation could actually interrupt pain signals traveling up the spinal cord, before they reach the brain.
After experimenting with different kinds, Baxter decided on a combination of cold temperature and high-speed vibrations — think running a cut under cold water, or rubbing a stubbed toe.
The vibrating bee attaches to thin ice packs that look like wings and then is placed above the location of the pain. The vibration also dilates nearby veins, Baxter says, making it easier to stick a needle in successfully.
(Oh, and it doesn't hurt that Buzzy looks like a cute toy. That's probably called the "spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down" theory.)
Since then, Baxter has discovered uses beyond shots and vaccinations. It helps block out itching, so kids with eczema can use Buzzy for relief, she says. It also can help with the pain of cleaning wounds, or drilling cavities at the dentist, or taking daily diabetes injections.
Baxter recently presented Buzzy at an AARP conference on its benefits for arthritis medication and dialysis. "People don't think about the fact that they can be empowered to control their own pain," she says.
Doctors were less excited about adopting Buzzy than she had expected; she thinks it's because they're generally more stoic when it comes to pain, she says.
But that hasn't hindered success: Over the past year, the 4-year-old company's sales nearly tripled, Baxter says.
SOURCE: N.P.R blog post npr.org
]]>No one enjoys getting injections. And yet, over our lifetime there will likely be numerous times when our health will require a medical procedure that involves a needle; whether that’s immunisation, a blood test or delivery of intravenous medicines.
Sadly, over the last 20 years, needle phobia has drastically increased; with one in four people suffering from the fear of needles. Perhaps more worryingly, it is believed one in 10 people will avoid vaccinations or needle procedures entirely, due to a fear of needles. This presents a significant challenge for the medical professionals whose job it is to protect us from serious, sometimes life-threatening illnesses.
Like many fears, needle phobia often originates from negative experiences in our childhood. Which is why it is so important that we do everything we can to make vaccinations as comfortable and stress-free as possible.
It was through personal experience of taking her own son for his routine vaccinations, that Dr Amy Baxter came up with the idea of Buzzy Bee; a playful and effective pain management tool, specifically designed to give children a positive experience when receiving those all important vaccinations.
As a medical professional, Dr Baxter was convinced of the need to protect her son from diseases and illness such as measles, mumps, rubella and polio. However, as a mum, she felt ill-equipped to protect him from the traumatic experience of being injected.
Baxter reflects on the irony, “Every time we had to go to the doctor, my son would get physically ill. There I was, a paediatric physician and pain specialist, and I couldn’t even protect my own kid. What were other parents going to do?”
Motivated on both a professional and personal level, Dr Baxter spent time researching into solutions for reducing the pain and anxiety experienced during childhood vaccinations. As injections and the use of needles play a vital part in modern medical care, she wanted to equip both parents and medical practitioners with a tangible tool that would stop children from developing a fear of needles.
The results of Dr Baxter’s research was the creation of Buzzy Bee, a small vibrating bee with cooling ice-pack wings that, along with other proven pain management techniques, can help reduce injection pain by 75%.
So what are the techniques you can use to help children through uncomfortable procedures? How can Buzzy Bee help?
Here are our top ten tips for reducing the pain of vaccinations.
1. Knowledge is power
As it is the parent’s responsibility to bring their children in for immunisations, empowering them to play their part during the procedure is going to lay the foundations for success. Any information given to them prior to the appointment, that outlines the procedure and what they can do to help their children have the best experience possible, will mean they arrive confident and calm.
2. Breastfeeding infants
Research shows that breastfeeding can have analgesic effects. Essentially, the physical connection to their mother, the act of sucking and the sweet-tasting milk all help to reduce pain for the baby. For best results, the breastfeeding mother should start breastfeeding before the procedure and continue during and after the injections.
3. The power of sugar
For infants up to 12 months, who are not breastfed, a sucrose solution given 1-2 minutes before the injections, also has the potential to give pain relief. One approach to preparing a sucrose solution is to mix one packet or cube of sugar with 10 ml (two teaspoons) of water in a medicine cup. Alternatively, sucrose solutions can be obtained from some pharmacies. Again, if the parent or caregiver bringing the child to the appointment is given this information ahead of time, they can come prepared.
4. Honesty is always the best policy
Building up trust with patients is very much on the agenda, so lying to a child and telling them it won’t hurt is not recommended. It may keep them calm before the first injection, but the inevitable pain will then come as a shock and the patient will have learnt that medical professionals aren’t honest with them. Equally, parents should be encouraged to be honest with their child for the same reason. The truth is, it will hurt a bit; but it’s also true that it’s over quickly.
5. The medical practitioner is not to be feared
Once the child and accompanying grown up arrives in the room, it’s important to put them at ease. This is your patch, and you are in control. A friendly and happy medical professional will affirm the thought that this is nothing to worry about and certainly nothing to be fearful of.
Introducing Buzzy Bee to the young patient, gives you an opportunity to engage them in conversation and create a rapport with them.
6. Injection order
Generally, children will be receiving more than one injection during their appointment, and some vaccinations are more painful than others. Plus, pain increases with every injection. Studies have shown that, when multiple injections are required, giving the most painful injection last will decrease the overall pain from both injections.
7. Sitting up, not lying down
Research shows that infants and children sitting up during injections is better for management of pain. Depending on the age and size of the child, helping them to get in a comfortable position whilst their parents hold them will mean the health practitioner is able to focus on giving speedy and successful injections.
As they are settling themselves on their parent’s lap, you can help attach Buzzy Bee near to the injection area. For best results, Buzzy should be put into position 30—60 seconds before the injection.
8. Tactile Stimulation
Providing tactile stimulation reduces the sensation of pain. It has been proven that vibration and cold can block the pain of an injection, in the same way that rubbing a bumped elbow helps the pain go away or cold running water soothes a burn.
Buzzy uses a combination of cold and vibration to replace pain with temperature and movement. Buzzy confuses the body’s nerves and distracts attention away from the pain, thereby dulling or eliminating sharp injection pain.
9. Distraction
We all know the pain is real, but it’s fleeting and distraction away from the procedure can make it feel like it was over in a second. Studies show that when parents focus on subjects that aren’t connected to the injection and try to make the child laugh, it’s far more effective than when they sympathise and console. Using Buzzy Distraction Cards will help parents to stay away from the unhelpful topics.
With older children and teenagers, audio or visual devices provide effective distraction. This is one of those rare times when they should be encouraged to play on their iPhone.
Why not put together a distraction kit for your clinic, including: a Buzzy Bee, distraction cards, pop-up books, bubbles, pinwheels and party blowers.
10. Breathing Techniques
Slow, deep breathing exercises not only work as a relaxation strategy, if facilitated by toys or activities, for example blowing bubbles, blowing a pinwheel or party blowers, they also serve as a distraction by focusing attention away from the procedure.
Show the child how to “tummy breath”, taking a deep breath in and then blowing it out slowly. Keep coaching the child to breathe deeply during the procedure.
Once the injections are done, lots of praise will go a long way. Positive affirmation as the last part of the procedure is a great way to end.
By using a combination of these top ten tips for pain reduction, patients will remember the needle pain as only a small part of the procedure. With any luck, the lasting memories of immunisations taken into adulthood will be of Buzzy Bees and funny conversations.
For parents and medical practitioners who would like to buy a Buzzy Bee and Buzzy Distraction Cards, go to https://www.buzzy4shots.com.au/collections/all
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