Pain Management

Pain Assessment Tools

These practice tools are available to help healthcare professionals diagnose and treat pain more appropriately in their patients. Pain is often regarded as the fifth vital sign in regard to healthcare because it is accepted now in healthcare that pain, like other vital signs, is an objective sensation rather than subjective. Most pain assessments are done in the form of a scale. The scale is explained to the patient, who then chooses a score. A rating is taken before administering any medication and after the specified time frame to rate the efficacy of treatment. Pain assessment tools mainly includes pain history or clinical history it includes general medical history and specific pain history intensity, location, pathophysiology etc. Uni-dimensional tool is simple easy and very useful mainly includes verbal descriptor scale, verbal numeric rating scale, visual analogue scale, wong-baker facial pain rating scale. Multidimensional instruments provides more complex information about pain, for assessing chronic pain and  those are time consuming