Strategies in postoperative pain assessment: validation study☆

Pain assessment and management are major clinical problems that many categories of health-care professionals have to deal with. Although there are many potentially successful approaches available for pain management, there is still a shortage of knowledge about the strategies used by staff members for the actual assessment of pain and how reliable these strategies are. The fact that patients often undergo a great deal of suffering from pain and lack of adequate pain relief may be considered an indicator of this shortage of knowledge. Clinical studies from different parts of the world reveal that the incidence of pain reported by patients is still high, with about 75% reporting moderate pain and an additional 15% severe pain. The aim of the present study was to validate different categories used in acute pain assessment and their accuracy in a new clinical sample and to explore further different dimensions of how staff members experience pain assessment. Intensive care nurses (n = 10) were carrying out pain assessment of postoperative patients (n = 30). Each pain assessment was followed by a detailed interview and indicating the estimated pain intensity on a visual analogue scale (VAS, 0–10 cm). The pain ratings by the nurses were compared to those of the patients to assess the accuracy of the pain assessments of the staff members. A previously developed category system for describing the initial empirical material regarding criteria the nurses relied on when assessing pain, combined with what experience has taught them in this respect, was used to assess the validity of previous observations. The results indicate that similar approaches were still used by the nurses but the accuracy of pain assessment had considerably improved.