Citation and extracts below from a Comment in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.
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CITATION: Paediatric pain management in low-income and middle-income countries
Swee Ping Tang et al.
The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. Published:October 13, 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-4642(20)30336-9
In many LMICs, specialised pain services by trained health-care professionals are either insufficient or not available at all even for adults, let alone for children. The management of acute postoperative pain in children is often neglected, procedural pain is largely ignored, and chronic and cancer pain minimally addressed, leaving many children to suffer, or die, while in pain...
Pain literacy among health-care professionals is low and cultural norms and beliefs that minimise the importance of pain treatment and pain assessment are potential barriers...
Many medications and techniques for relieving pain are not available or accessible to children in LMICs. Even oral morphine, which is on WHO's list of essential medicines, is scarcely available in LMICs, leaving 75% of the world with little or no access to opioids...
We need to improve the availability and accessibility of pain management services... debunking misconceptions about their use through public conversations and education of health-care professionals...
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Best wishes, Neil
Let's build a future where children are no longer dying for lack of healthcare information - Join CHIFA (Child Healthcare Information For All): http://www.hifa.org/forums/chifa-child-health-and-rights
CHIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is the coordinator of the HIFA campaign (Healthcare Information For All) and assistant moderator of the CHIFA forum. Twitter: @hifa_org FB: facebook.com/HIFAdotORG neil@hifa.org
