Assessment of Reliability and Validity of the Behavioral Observation Record for Developmental Care

Extremity Movements Help Occupational Therapists Identify Stress Responses in Preterm Infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: A Systematic Review

“…According to the NIDCAP ® , repeated fisting is usually interpreted as an indicator of stress (Als, 1984;Cheng & Chapman, 1997) and was also described in another study that examined preterm infant responses to pain (Bozzette, 1993). Furthermore, a recent study showed that fisting is considered by a majority of nurses to be a pain indicator (Howard & Thurber, 1998) (see Figure 3).…”

“…Indeed, these stress responses represent markers of the mismatch between a preterm infant's developmental capacities and its environment. Accurate assessment and interpretation of these movements is Despite the wide use of the NIDCAP ® , not all occupational therapists are NIDCAP ® certified because this program is both labour intensive (Cheng & Chapman, 1997;Tribotti & Stein, 1992) and expensive to implement (e.g., Petryshen, Stevens, Hawkins, & Stewart, 1997). Moreover, understanding the ways in which pain and stress may influence preterm infant development and how they are assessed currently is a highly specialized area of practice.…”

A Reliable Pain Assessment Tool for Clinical Assessment in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

“…As the PAT score has been found to be reliable and valid, future research may be able to identify what aspects of the PAT score represent discomfort other than pain by using the comfort interventions of Als et al (1994), and behavioral observations may be recorded as part of a developmental care strategy (Cheng & Chapman, 1997;Grunau et al, 2000). The infant's behavioral state and environmental factors at the time of the assessment could also be factors to measure to determine their influence on the infants' pain scores (Grunau et al, 2000;Morison et al, 2001).…”