Assessment of Acute Pain in Children

Pain assessment is an important component of emergency department care. Children present unique challenges to assessing pain due to their constantly changing developmental ability to understand concepts, communicate verbally, and use common pain severity rating scales. Pain severity in young and noncommunicating cognitively impaired children is rated using behavioral scales. School-aged children use faces scales to self-report pain severity, whereas older preteens and adolescents can use the verbal numeric rating scale. There are numerous other important aspects of the pain experience to assess other than severity, such as location, mechanism, neuropathology, onset, provokers and palliaters, quality, radiation, and timing.