Why are we here?

The majority of sick babies and young children experience pain in hospital as a result of illness or treatment. Such children are unable to communicate this to their carers. While every effort is made to give them adequate pain relief, not enough is known about either the nature of pain in infancy or of the best ways to assess pain to be entirely confident that current treatment is effective. Because children are immature individuals it is not possible to extrapolate the results of studies performed on adults to the care of infants.

In order to make our treatment more effective, we need to understand how the nervous system processes pain information in young infants and how to measure accurately their responses to pain and its treatment. We also need to know how pain in infancy affects later sensation and pain experiences by children as they grow.

Here at the UCL Paediatric Pain Research Group we aim to find out these and other essential facts about children's pain.

Because our research is a collaboration between basic scientists in the laboratory and clinical scientists who care for sick infants and children, we are in a unique position to best answer these questions. We plan to share the results of our research immediately with healthcare professionals and the public to improve the treatment and prevention of pain in this vulnerable group.

We are only here through the funding of key charities and grant awarding bodies:

• WellChild 
• Medical Research Council
• Wellcome Trust
• Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust and the Institute of Child Health
• Portex
• Foundation of Nursing Studies