the effect of virtual reality on pain in primiparity women during episiotomy repair: a randomize clinical trial

background: pain is one of the side effects of episiotomy. the virtual reality (vr) is a non-pharmacological method for pain relief. the purpose of this study was to determine the effect of using video glasses on pain reduction in primiparity women during episiotomy repair. methods: this clinical trial was conducted on 30 primiparous parturient women having labor at omolbanin hospital (mashhad, iran) during may-july 2012. samples during episiotomy repair were randomly divided into two equal groups. the intervention group received the usual treatment with vr (video glasses and local infiltration 5 ml solution of lidocaine 2%) and the control group only received local infiltration (5 ml solution of lidocaine 2%). pain was measured using the numeric pain rating scale (0-100 scale) before, during and after the episiotomy repair. data were analyzed using fisher’s exact test, chi-square, mann-whitney and repeated measures anova tests by spss 11.5 software. results: there were statistically significant differences between the pain score during episiotomy repair in both groups (p=0.038). conclusion: virtual reality is an effective complementary non-pharmacological method to reduce pain during episiotomy repair. trial registration number: irct138811063185n1.