Pain management in hospitalized children: A cross-sectional study.
Joese Aparecida Carvalho, Danton Matheus de Souza, Flávia Domingues and 3 others
PMID 35652630WHAT IT FOUND
In 1,251 hospitalized children, pain care gaps were common: 481 had pain, 11.2% were not assessed, and only 6 received recorded non-pharmacological measures.
Nurses should audit assessment, medication administration, and reassessment.
Key findings
01Pain was documented for 481 children, and 11.2% of the sample were not assessed with a validated scale.
02Among children with pain, 95.6% had analgesics prescribed but only 81.7% were medicated; 18.3% received no analgesia despite prescribed medication.
03Non-pharmacological measures were recorded for only 6 children, and only 40.3% of children with pain had reassessment recorded.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
It used old hospital charts from one pediatric unit over one year, so it may not apply to other hospitals or patients. Records were excluded if pain information was missing or incomplete, so poorly documented pain may be under-counted. The study relied on what was written in charts and nursing notes, so non-pharmacological measures and reassessments may have been done but not recorded. The authors note missing data about the child's clinical condition and poor filling of the pain assessment instrument.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the 0.4% non-pharmacological figure as proof that non-pharmacological measures were not used. The institutional form did not have a field for recording them, so they may have been given but not documented.