High-risk neonates experience numerous painful/stressful procedures daily in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Accumulated pain and stress have a detrimental impact on infants’ neurodevelopment. Few valid tools are available to measure accumulated pain/stressors among NICU infants. The aim of this study was to obtain nurses’ perceptions about severity and acuity levels regarding each painful/stressful procedure that infants may experience in the NICU. The data will support developing a new instrument, the Accumulated Pain/Stressor Scale (APSS) in NICUs.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of white noise as a distraction method in relieving procedural pain caused by vaccination for premature infants. This experimental study was performed at a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of a university hospital in Turkey between July and September 2013. The study population was composed of 75 premature infants (35 in the study group and 40 in the control group) who met the inclusion criteria. Premature infants in the study group were exposed to white noise using MP3 players placed at the head of the infants’ open crib for 1 minute before vaccination.