Understanding the Minimization of Needle Pain in Clinical Practice: A Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Needle procedures are a common source of pain in healthcare, yet pain is often underrecognized and undertreated, leading to anxiety, care avoidance, and distrust in medical systems.This scoping review synthesizes literature on needle pain across settings and populations, identifying barriers to effective management at patient, provider, and systems levels.Using Arksey and O'Malley's framework and PRIS-MA-ScR guidelines, we searched five databases for English-language peer-reviewed articles .Twenty-five studies met inclusion criteria and were analyzed thematically.Four themes emerged: (1) normalization of procedural pain, (2) patient and caregiver distress, (3) provider attitudes and knowledge gaps, and (4) systemic and policy-level shortcomings.Despite strong evidence for interventions like topical anesthetics and distraction techniques, they remain inconsistently used.Vulnerable groups are disproportionately affected.Addressing needle pain requires standardized protocols, provider training, and policy change to embed pain management into routine, ethical, patient-centered care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.033 | 0.143 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.020 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".