Reducing Pain and Anxiety During Dressing Changes After Burn Surgery Using Virtual Reality

Summary

Burn injury and its treatment is an intensely painful experience. Most severely injured patients require numerous dressing changes and skin grafting procedures (removing skin from healthy part of the body and moving it to damaged area of the body). This procedure cause extensive pain and anxiety and many patients can become dependent on pain killers during their hospital stay and throughout rehabilitation. This can delay reintegration into society and increase the chance of opioid dependence. An effective pain management plan plays a large role in patient recovery.

In addition to the physical pain experienced by these patients, burn injury is an intensely stressful and emotional life experience. This study will use a non-drug approach to reduce pain and extensive use of pain killers (opioids) during dressing changes. In particular, the study will use an immersive (allows to experience computer-generated environment as a real world) Virtual reality (VR) distraction tool during dressing change after skin graft surgery. Individuals who will decide to participate in this study will be asked to wear headgear to view immersive 360 videos specially designed by the study team. Before and after this exposure participants will be asked to complete a measurement of their anxiety level (VAS) and rate their pain.

This study will help to determine if using VR as a distraction tool during painful dressing changes will reduce pain and anxiety, and therefore opioid medications requirements, and will rely on participants experience and adapt VR videos according to participants' response.

Conditions

• Pain, Postoperative
• Trauma
• Burns

Interventions

OTHER

Immersive VR Video

The VR-360 video will be custom-made for the burn patient population. Through a review of current evidence for video scenarios/patients surveys, the study team will define and implement the key components appropriate for acute procedural pain such as type, duration and severity in this patient population. Next, patients will be asked about preferred pain relief elements (e.g. individual colours, geographical locations, sounds, etc.) that would help to design a video scenario. Finally, using a Likert pain scale, patients will be asked to rate each individual descriptor that exacerbates or alleviates pain. For instance, the colour red may be associated with 'flames', 'heat' and 'burns', and thus elevated pain, the colour blue may have the opposite effect, representing 'cooling' or 'cold'. Combined, this information will be used to create a VR-360 video geared towards alleviating acute procedural pain in patients with burn injuries undergoing dressing changes after skin graft.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Alan D Rogers, MD · SHSC

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2021-03-24

Primary Completion

2026-06-30

Completion

2026-06-30

Countries

• Canada

Study Locations