Neonatal and Pediatric Medicine
Open Access

Critique of the Use of Neonatal Infant Pain Scale (NIPS)

Hala Obiedat¹ and Effat Ibrahim Al-Maaitah²

¹Department of Maternal Child Health Nursing, Mutah University, Jordan

²Princess Muna Collage for Nursing, Mutah University, Jordan

Received Date: Dec 31, 2019 / Accepted Date: Jan 30, 2020 / Published Date: Feb 06, 2020

Citation: Hala Obiedat and Effat Ibrahim Al-Maaitah (2020) Critique of the Use of Neonatal Infant Pain Scale (NIPS). Neonat Pediatr Med 6: 186.

Copyright: © 2020 Obiedat H, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Background: Pain is a subjective phenomenon, difficult to quantify and qualify, especially on neonates who are unable to self-report their pain which are gold standard of pain measurement in other age groups. The need for a pain measure is a clinically important for guiding pain management practices and evaluating the effectiveness of a particular intervention. Pain assessment tools have been developed and validated, but they are rarely used because they are too complicated.

Purpose: The aim of this integrative literature review was to critique the studies related of the use of Neonatal Infant Pain Scale (NIPS) to measure the pain as the fifth vital sign.

Method: Electronic searches were conducted using the following database: CINAHL, Science Direct, Pub Med and EBSCO. The search generated 40 articles; 30articles fit to the criteria of the integrative literature review.

Result: Neonatal Infant Pain Scale is multidimensional tool with sufficient psychometric prosperities because it had excellent inter rater reliability, concurrent validity, construct validity and predictive validity which should be essential for accurate assessment and appropriate interventions.

Conclusion: This review suggests implementing the NIPS scale as valid reliable tool to monitor pain routinely in the clinical practice, because it’s easily applied in comparison with other pain assessment tools.

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