Children's Pain Assessment

. Assessment of Pain:

Assessment of children’s pain is essential for our study. It allows us to evaluate the efficiency of hypnosis in offering pain reduction for participants and to determine the level this reduction. The primary purpose of assessment is to design and guide pain management interventions and the study process. Thus, assessment strategies are a continuous and integral part of the study. They are used to identify and target problems for intervention, to match the hypnosis sessions to the patient’s needs and to evaluate the effectiveness of ongoing sessions. The assessment of children’s pain is especially problematic as younger children or those with developmental delays often do not have the language or cognitive sophistication

Studies have also showed discrepancies between patient’s and the nursing staff ‘s assessment of pain (Heidrich,Perry,&Amand,1981;Perry,Heidrich, & Ramos,1981; Perry &Heidrich ,1982; Varchol,1983;Walkenstein,1982).Nurses rate pain as less severe than patients rate their pain. Most of the assessment is made from the nurses’ perceptions of pain .However only the person experiencing pain can tell another what it is like.43However, self-reports have two major problems.First, they require the child to have a level of cognitive and linguistic development, which excludes all preverbal children .The second problem is that self-report measures are open to bias because of the demand characteristics of the specific situation. Among the methods used to numerical rating scales and face

For statistical purpose and in order to quantify pain ,the faces are assigned to numerical value .43Several variants of face scales 43 have been developed to measure children’s level of pain. Numerical rating scales use numbers (i.e. 0–5, 0–10, 0–100) to reflect increasing degrees of pain.They are argued to be appropriate for children because they do not employ sophisticated words or abstract numerical values. Psychometrics have generally been strong for these scales.Faces scales have been shown to correlate highly with other self-report indices (Spafford, von Baeyer, & Hicks, 2002), behavioral measures of pain (MacLaren& Cohen, 2005), and to be sensitive to analgesic and nonpharmacological interventions (Gold, Hyeon Kim, Kant, Joseph, & Rizzo, 2006; Spafford et al., 2002), to decrease during postprocedure (Paik &Ahn, 2002; Smith, Shah, Goldman, & Taddio,2007), and to vary depending on the pain stimulus (e.g., different immunizations; Wood et al.,