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- Open Access
Agreement of pain assessment between nurses and patients in the Emergency Department
- Published: 1 March 2011
Keywords
- Emergency Department
- Pain Intensity
- Numeric Rate Scale
- Nursing Practice
- Pain Assessment
Introduction
Methods
A purposive sample of 100 patients and 36 nurses in the triage and clinical area within the ED was selected from 5Azar Hospital in Gorgan. The questionnaire included two components: participant characteristics and the Numeric Rating Scale (NRS). A questionnaire was administered twice to each patient. In triage the patients were asked to rate their pain intensity. Separately, the nurses assessed the patient's pain intensity. This process was repeated with the same patients after referring them to a clinical area within the ED, but the nurses were different. Gathered data were described by frequency distribution tables and analyzed by Wilcoxon, Mann-Whitney and Spearman tests. P < 0.05 was considered significant.
Results
Patients' (n = 100) and nurses' (n = 36) pain intensity scores
Triage area | Clinical area | Total | |
---|---|---|---|
Nurses | 7.60 (2.1) | 5.94 (2.33) | 6.77 (2.36) |
Patients | 9.13 (1.26) | 7.36 (2.56) | 8.24 (2.20) |
Correlation | r = 0.612 | r = 0.373 | r = 0.528 |
Conclusions
The findings have implications for the management of patients' pain by highlighting the need for more accurate pain assessment. Further research is required to elucidate the way in which nurses and patients conceptualize pain and to understand better the process of pain assessment in clinical nursing practice.
Authors’ Affiliations
References
- Eder SC, et al.: Am J Emerg Med. 2003, 21: 253-257. 10.1016/S0735-6757(03)00041-XView ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Marquié L, et al.: Acute Pain. 2008, 10: 31-37.View ArticleGoogle Scholar
Copyright
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.