Impact of a Targeted Intervention on Parental Administration of Post-operative Analgesia

In her Masters research, Rebecca Pillai Riddell identified significant factors that predict parental attitudes toward administering pain medication to children after surgery. Now she’s taking this work one step further by recruiting parents of children undergoing day care surgery at B.C.’s Children’s Hospital for a project assessing the effectiveness of a targeted intervention designed to dispel common parental myths and misconceptions about proper pain management. Given that parents play a key role in post-operative pain management, Rebecca is testing the effectiveness of this intervention on parents identified as more likely to under-medicate, and parents identified as less likely to under-medicate. She hopes the study will help bridge the gap between laboratory research and the everyday experience of children with post-operative pain.