Breaking Down the Barriers to Pediatric Procedural Preparation

Children experience frequent medical pain, which can have short‐ and long‐term negative repercussions. Fortunately, preparation programs and behavioral interventions have been developed to minimize procedural anxiety and pain, and offset delayed negative effects of the medical stressors on children. Translating these empirical findings into practice has been a struggle due to a number of barriers, including myths and negative attitudes about children's pain, costs of the preparation programs, time needed to implement interventions, lack of cross‐disciplinary collaboration, and insular training of professionals. This commentary explores these and other impediments to dissemination of research findings and offers a number of potential solutions and future directions to facilitate putting evidence‐based pain management preparation and intervention programs into medical practice.