Coping Behaviors of Pediatric Patients to Post-operative Pain after Appendectomy

Abstract

Background:   Post-operative pain could cause many undesirable effects on a patient who has just underwent an operation.This complex problem of pain management, if left unheeded, usually inflicted dire consequences upon the patient. So it is frequently observed that each individual patient would have his or her own various coping mechanism to deal with this pain problem which also true for the young patient.The patients in the pediatric group behave differently when response to this kind of post-operative problem which include lying still, watching movies, listening to the music etc., and it is not uncommon for some of these aforementioned methods to eventually and effectively relieve the patient’s post-operative pain.

Objective :  To identify the coping behaviors of pediatrics patients after the appendectomy. And to analyse the result by applying the statistical tool to compare subjects different demographic data.

Methods :  Descriptive study of 8-15 years-old patients those were admitted to Pediatric Surgical Inpatient Unit (14/4 Building) after receiving appendectomy as the treatment for acute appendicitis. At the sample size of 156 cases, coping behavior of each patient was identified. Then we used the percentile, mean, standard deviation, t-test and F-test as the statistical tools for data analysis.

Results   Majority of the patients are male (61.5%), average age between 11–15 years-old (69.2%). All of the subjects never received operation of any kind before and they also did not know about any method of pain management.There are six types of patients’ perception what they experienced about pain which were pain is the bad feeling (32.7%), pity and sympathy for nearby pediatric patient with whom some kind of intervention was done unto him/her (32%), worsened pain when intervention was done when the parents were absent (28.7%), pain was terrible and frightened thing (27.2%) and pain was indescribable (24.6%). The mostly employed coping behavior was immobilization by lying still on the bed (50%) and about 42% chose to protect and handle the soft tissue nearby surgical wound with their own hands whenever they moved. And when compares different demographical data such as age, sex, order of child in the family, number of siblings, method of child care and parental income. We found no statistical difference between these data.

Conclusion :   From this study we found that there were various coping behaviors of pediatric patients to post-operative pain. We believe that it is the utmost important thing for the caring nurses to provide this kind of knowledge to the patient and his/her parents. And to apply appropriate method for this post-operative pain management.