View article

BACKGROUND:

Difficulty assessing pain has been cited as one of the primary reasons for infrequent and inadequate assessment and analgesia for children with cognitive impairment (CI). Several behavioral observational pain tools have been shown to have good psychometric properties for pain assessment in this population; however, routine clinical use may depend largely on their pragmatic qualities. We designed this study to evaluate pragmatic attributes or clinical utility properties of three recently developed pain assessment tools for children with CI.

METHODS:

A sample of clinicians from three medical centers were asked to review 15 videotaped observations of children with CI, recorded during their first three postoperative days during participation in a previous study. Participants scored pain using the revised-Face, Legs, Activity, Cry, Consolability (r-FLACC) tool (individualized for the child during the …