Introduction:

Pain is one of the symptoms that causes more suffering in any disease. It also constitutes a basic health problem all over the world, which is frequently under-diagnosed mostly in the area of Pediatrics with a special deficit in the prescription of opioid analgesics.

Objective:

To characterize the knowledge of opioid analgesics and their prescription made by pediatric health professionals.

Material and Method:

An ad hoc questionnaire, which was validated by the Delphi Method, was applied to 43 pediatricians of three Hospitals in Havana province from March 2017 to March 2018.

Results:

The knowledge of the pharmacology of opioid analgesics was insufficient in 81.3 %, regular in 13 %, and good in 5,7 %. The most frequent barriers in the prescription of opioids were the fear to respiratory depression (71,9%), scarcity of opioids in the Basic Drugs Chart (56,3%), and the fear to addiction (36,3%). Opioids are prescribed only in 39,5% of the cases, being codeine and tramadol the ones that are more frequently prescribed. In 55.8 % of the inquired cases, the formation and updating in analgesia was insufficient, in 28% it was fairly good, and only in 16.2 % it was considered good.

Conclusions:

The insufficient pharmacologic knowledge of opioids and the poor availability of these drugs are the factors that most influence on the inadequate management of pain in Pediatrics in our study.

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