Moving beyond pain scores: Multidimensional pain assessment is essential for adequate pain management after surgery.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Clinical experience teaches us that patients are willing to accept postoperative pain, despite high pain intensity scores. Nevertheless, relationships between pain scores and other methods of pain assessment, e.g. acceptability of pain or its interference with physical functioning, are not fully established. Our aims were to examine these relationships.

Methods

A cross-sectional study was conducted on patients who underwent major surgery between January 2008 and August 2013. Using logistic regression, we quantified the relationships between movement-evoked pain scores on the numerical rating scale (NRS-MEP) and three dichotomous dependent variables: patient's opinion on acceptability of pain (PO: acceptable or unacceptable pain); nurses' observation of patient's p

SUBMITTER: van Boekel RLM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5425226 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature