Nursing practices in neonatal pain relief and barriers to neonatal pain management in a referral hospital, Southern Ghana

Neonatal pain remains a foremost distressing signal affecting various dimensions of life even into adulthood. Advances in neonatal care offer effective pathways for pain management but access to quality pain management is limited across several contexts as a result of inadequate staff training, lack of best practice guidelines, care provider attitudes and lack of resources. These gaps which are associated with poorly managed neonatal pain presents neurodevelopment challenges, behavioral problems, and long-term cognitive, social, and emotional issues. The aim of this study was to explore - nurses’ knowledge and attitude towards neonatal pain management in a private referral health care facility. This study adopted an exploratory descriptive design to engage ten (10) registered nurses who were frontline health workers in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of the hospital. After ethics approval and institutional permission were obtained, the nurses were purposively sampled, and data collected though in-person audio-recorded interviews using a semi-structured interview guide. Two (2) major themes and eight (8) subthemes were derived from the data. The study revealed gaps in nurses’ understanding about neonatal pain perception, and decision-making issues on nonpharmacological and pharmacological pain relief measures. These gaps influenced care providers’ attitudes towards neonatal pain management. Structured in-service training needs to be incorporated into routine professional education for neonatal health care providers to improve knowledge and attitude; further research should be conducted to generate contextual evidence on neonatal pain management.