Behavioral Interventions for Infant Immunizations

Effect of Distraction Technique During Immunization to Reduce Behaviour Response Score (FLACC) to Pain in Toddlers

“…light and sound producing toys and cartoon movies are effective in reducing pain during and after immunization. Results are comparable with other studies 40,41 . It has been reported that distraction strategies that use two senses (visual with audio) appears to be more effective in reducing pain than the use of either one alone; and content, intensity, and combinations of multisensory stimuli are important elements of distraction interventions 42 .…”

“…Pain reduction was also reported in previous studies when using various distraction methods in American children during vaccination 38,39 and during other injection procedures³² as well as in American infants during vaccination 40,41 . Finding of our study indicates that distraction technique i.e.…”

Reducing the pain of childhood vaccination: an evidence-based clinical practice guideline

“…3 Parent coaching involves prior training in distraction combined with appropriate parental behaviours. The two RCTs 51,54 and one study with quasi-experimental design 55 included in our systematic review, 11 with a total of 212 children aged two months to two years, yielded insufficient evidence to support parent coaching as a strategy to reduce pain. There were no differences in researcher-rated child pain or parent-rated child distress.…”

“…Our systematic review 11 included four RCTs that examined parent-led distraction in 324 children aged one month to seven years. [50][51][52][53] A metaanalysis of these studies showed that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that they reduce pain associated with vaccine injections. No differences were observed in children's self-reported pain, children's pain as rated by a researcher or children's distress as reported by a nurse or a parent.…”

The role of maternal depressed mood and behavioural soothing on infant response to routine vaccination

“…Another important issue in the study of infant pain is the identification of effective parental soothing interventions. Although one study failed to demonstrate a direct relation between maternal soothing and infant stress response in the context of inoculation [6], most empirical research in this area indicates that maternal behaviour is related to infant distress [2,3,7–9]. Specifically, behaviours involving close physical proximity between mother and infant (e.g.…”