International Journal of Medical Science and Research

authors
Reshma K Revindran, Sumathi PV, Usha Marath

abstract
Pain is one of the most common symptoms experienced by children after surgery. Pain assessment is the most important and critical component of pain management. The present study aims to find out the nursing activities in assessment, management, and documentation of postoperative pain among children and to assess the outcome of assessment, management, and documentation of postoperative pain among children. The sample consisted of 14 staff nurses who had taken care of 50 children with postoperative pain. The tools used were observation checklist to assess the nursing activities and an audit tool to measure the outcome of nursing activities. After getting informed consent from staff nurses the nursing activities were observed during assessment, management and documentation of postoperative pain episodes in children. Investigator assessed the pain score at the time of presentation, heart rate, respiratory rate, SpO_2, quality and location of pain and pain score after one hour. Concurrent audit of the patient records were done with nursing audit tool. The findings of the study revealed that pain assessment were done in 70% of episodes. None of them used age appropriate pain scales for assessment of pain. Only in 62% of pain episodes interventions were performed and out of that 96.7% were documented. As per concurrent auditing of the 50 records, in the assessment part, it was found that two percent documented the verbal cues and 24% documented intensity of pain. After auditing of 50 records it was found that pain related findings were documented only in 31 records, hence data regarding management, reassessment and documentation was presented based on auditing of 31 records. The results showed that 32.25% documented the reassessment findings and out of the interventions performed 96.7% were documented. The study has great implications in nursing practice and administration.