Introduction: Burn injuries are a major public health problem. Preschool children are especially vulnerable to burn injuries because of their limited knowledge and recognition of risks, protection methods and first aid; as studies indicates, lack of experience and knowledge often results in a higher number of accidents, which is the reasons why paediatric burns account for 30-40% of total hospitalized burn patients, in addition to being the fifth most common cause of non-fatal childhood injuries. (1)

Materials and methods: The research work was conducted by doing a traditional literature review, which involved gathering and summarising important information in textbooks and journal articles related to the topic. This article was written after consulting 25 different sources in both English and Italian, found through PubMed and Cinahl. The PIO model was used to define the research questions.

Results: The results showed that therapies instituted to treat some kind of injuries can be painful, and cause overwhelming anxiety, fear and, consequently, a wide range of psychological and physical reactions in children of all ages. (2)

Management of pain usually involve the use of opioid analgesics, with the integration of other drugs, which act directly on the receptors of the nervous system. (3)

Literature helps defining a range of useful techniques to reduce and manage the pain, like the use of virtual reality. (2)

In relation to anxiety, the research highlighted some methods to effectively reduce it during the treatment. Medical hypnosis, for example, can be an effective way to cope with stress and relax the patient. In contrast, there are very few scales which can be used to evaluate the level of anxiety, which makes more difficult to properly understand the psychological state of a very young patient. (2)

Conclusion: This study set out to discover and highlight the main methods for assessing pain and anxiety in a child with burn injuries. Through a rigorous search, a range of useful scales techniques to reduce and evaluate and manage the pain were found. Nevertheless, the results also highlighted a scarce presence of non-pharmacological methods and procedures applicable to effectively evaluate the level of anxiety in younger patients. Communicating with children can be extremely challenging, and for this reason, it's especially difficult to create scales and methods to effectively assess something as subjective as the anxiety level. However, there are some tools to work with, and by investing more time and resources, considerable progress to help younger patients can be made.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.         Khadra C., Ballard A., Déry J., Paquin D., Fortin JS., Perreault I., Labbe DR., Hoffman HG., Bouchard S., LeMay S., Projector-based virtual reality dome environment for procedural pain and anxiety in young children with burn injuries: a pilot study, Journal of Pain Reserch, 2018;11: 343–53.

2.         Chester SJ., Stockton K., De Young A., Kipping B., Tyack Z., Griffin B., Chester RB., Kimble RM., Effectiveness of medical hypnosis for pain reduction and faster wound healing in pediatric acute burn injury: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial. Trials, 2016;17:223.

3.         Sharar SR., Miller W., Teeley A., Soltani M., Hoffman HG., Jensen MP., Patterson DR., Applications of virtual reality for pain management in burn-injured patients, Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics. 2008; 8:1667–74.