Pain is a disabling and devastating symptom that is experienced by a majority of hospitalized patients. Pain assessment and management have been less than ideal for all hospitalized patients. However, it is the population of nonverbal patients who are neglected most often. Most of the existing pain assessment scales are designed for patients who are alert, oriented and can verbally self report their perception of their level of pain. Until recently, there have been no simple, easy to use, valid, and reliable instruments to adequately assess pain in adult nonverbal patient. There is a reliable behavioral pain assessment scale (FLACC) for children. An easy to use adult nonverbal pain scale (NVPS) was developed by nurses caring for burn trauma patients and was found to be reliable and valid in that population (2003). In order to be able to assess pain levels of nonverbal patients in our institution we decided to evaluate the NVPS with our medical nonverbal patients. The purpose of this study is to: 1) use nonverbal pain scales with acutely ill patients; 2) compare various nonverbal pain scales nurse ratings: 3) explore relationships between nonverbal pain scale ratings, and 4) examine reliability and validity of the nonverbal pain scales. The conceptual framework for this study is the University of California San Francisco Symptom Management Model (2001), which has the assumption that nonverbal patients may experience symptoms and the interpretation by the caregiver is assumed to be accurate for purposes of intervening. Subjects include all nonverbal patients in an acute medical nursing unit in a community hospital who cannot self report pain. The study design is psychometric evaluation. Paired assessments will be performed by two nurses using the two forms of the NVPS and FLACC scale. Data analysis will include coefficient alpha, t-tests, ANOVA and pearson’s correlation.
Session #1219 - Poster Session I
The 29th Annual MNRS Research Conference (April 1-4, 2005)