Background/Objective: Parents express great readiness to actively deliver comfort for their infant during painful procedures. Previous research shows evidence for the efficacy of skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding, preferably in combination. Live parental lullaby singing combined with skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding has not previously been investigated during painful procedures. Parents as pain management in Swedish neonatal care (SWEpap), is a cutting-edge interdisciplinary multi-center study with mixed methods. The randomized controlled trial investigates the efficacy of combined parent-delivered pain management compared with standard care during routine blood sampling of healthy newborn infants.
Method: The aim of this analysis was to investigate how meaningful the parents experienced providing procedural pain management to their newborn infant in the three treatment groups; standard care with glucose, skin-to-skin contact, or a combination of skin-to-skin contact, breastfeeding (if applicable) and live parental lullaby singing. The parents rated the meaningfulness of the various conditions on a 100 mm visual analogue scale (VAS) from “not meaningful” on the left end point, up to “most possible meaningful” on the right end point of the scale. The parents were also asked to comment on how they experienced providing pain management.
Result: A total number of 151 newborn infants with at least one parent, participated in this analysis. The mean VAS-ratings for meaningfulness were 82.1 for standard care with glucose, 89.5 for skin-to-skin contact, and 88.9 for combined interventions with live parental lullaby singing, breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact. The ratings for parent-delivered pain-alleviation were significantly higher than for standard care (p=0.036). Parents in all groups expressed that it was meaningful to provide pain-relief and participate in the pain management of their newborn infant.
Conclusion: Parents found it meaningful to provide parent-delivered pain-alleviating interventions with skin-to-skin contact, breastfeeding and live parental lullaby singing during painful procedures in postnatal care. The parents stated that they will continue using these methods in future painful situations.