NEONATAL PAIN

Key words: Neonatal pain, Analgesia, Care

Neonatal pain is still today inadequately treated. This flaw is due to several reasons, among which the difficulty to consider newborns as patients like others and to understand their language. Newborns feel pain and it is our duty to prevent, recognize and treat it. More than 30 scales have been developed to evaluate pain, but a gold standard has not been found. We have good therapeutic instruments for pain treatment. It is necessary to use adequate analgesia also for minor invasive procedures: in the last few years the use of non-pharmacological analgesia has made big progress, e.g. instillation of sweet solution or performing sensorial saturation. However, in neonatal analgesia, attention should be paid not only to the use of analgesia, but also to doctors’ and parents’ suffering.