Niang-Huei Peng
National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
Title: Effectiveness of pain and symptom management training for pediatric clinicians
Biography
Biography: Niang-Huei Peng
Abstract
Pain and symptom management is the most important area of pediatric palliative care, but clinicians often receive little training in this area. Our research evaluated the effectiveness of pain and symptom management training among pediatric professionals. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest study was used. Fifty-three pediatric nurses and 18 pediatricians participated in this study for a response rate of 80%. Results showed significant main effects of training on confidence levels (p- value < 0.001), and attitude scores (p- value < 0.001) among pediatric clinicians in a variety of areas with no differences in scores between pediatricians and nurses. This suggests that education can effectively increase pediatric clinicians’ confidence in and attitudes toward providing pain and symptom management for children with severe illness. Further training is needed to promote interdisciplinary healthcare team work to improve the effectiveness of pain and symptom management.