Pain Scales for Non-Communicative Critical Care Patients

Abstract

It is widely accepted in the nursing community that pain is considered an additional “vital sign” and should be assessed frequently. This is easily done with communicative patients based on the Numerical Rating Scale (NRS). However, the difficulty comes when assessment of pain in a noncommunicative patient is required. According to Rijkenberg, et.al. (2015) uncontrolled pain can have short and long term effects on a patient’s psychological and physiological outcomes. It is our duty as health care workers to provide adequate pain relief to help reduce agitation, caused by excessive pain, which can also distract a patient from the process of recovery (Rahu, et.al. 2015). The main pain scale most frequently utilized is FLACC, which was a “pain scale developed for use in infant and child populations less than 7 years old (Buttes, et.al. 2014)”. The pain scale most often emphasized for use in noncommunicative patients is the CPOT. The purpose of this literature review was to determine if FLACC is a reliable and valid pain scale for use with noncommunicative patients compared to the use of CPOT to assess and control pain