Grant: Project Grant

Hospitalized babies usually experience seven painful procedures per day, on average, for their treatment and recovery. Pain can negatively affect development and growth, resulting in long-lasting impacts. There is a lot of knowledge on pain assessment and treatment for babies, but hospitalized babies all over the world often do not benefit from this knowledge. To improve the use of knowledge at the bedside, we developed the Implementation of Infant Pain Practice Change (ImPaC) Resource, an online tool that helps clinicians assess and treat pain in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). A Canadian study showed that ImPaC improved pain assessment and treatment practices in NICUs. Although promising, these results may not apply to NICUs in other countries as ImPaC has only been evaluated in Canada, a well-resourced country. There is even less pain assessment and treatment knowledge being used in NICUs in low-resourced countries, such as Brazil. To enable the use of ImPaC in Brazil, the local language, context, and culture need to be taken into account. This research aims to translate and adapt ImPaC for use in Brazil, and to create a process that will enable the translation and adaptation of ImPaC for use in other low-resourced countries. Researchers and potential ImPaC users (e.g., Brazilian clinicians) will employ different strategies to translate and adapt ImPaC and its content and to document and evaluate the process. We also aim to explore factors that may facilitate or hinder the use of ImPaC in Brazil. Our team is comprised of experienced researchers with diverse knowledge that is relevant to this project and we will create learning opportunities for students. We will share our results with different audiences (e.g., researchers, health managers and clinicians) and invite them to use the Brazilian version of ImPaC and to engage in further translations and adaptations of ImPaC for use in other low-resourced countries.