Clinical Research Directory
Browse clinical research sites, groups, and studies.
Reducing Pain and Anxiety During Dressing Changes After Burn Surgery Using Virtual Reality
Sponsor: Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
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.
Official title: BURN 360: Reducing Pain and Anxiety During Dressing Changes After Burn Surgery Using Virtual Reality
Key Details
Gender
All
Age Range
18 Years - Any
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Enrollment
80
Start Date
2021-03-24
Completion Date
2026-06
Last Updated
2026-03-16
Healthy Volunteers
No
Conditions
Interventions
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.
Locations (1)
Sunnybrook Research Institute
Toronto, Canada