Background
Pain is, by nature, a subjective experience influenced by social, psychological, and experiential factors.
Nowadays, pain relief is considered an imperative of the pediatric emergency nursing. Analgesia administration influences the entire child’s medical experience and can have a lasting effect on patient and family’s reaction to current and future medical cares [1].
Pain assessment represents the first step for analgesia management and it should be performed routinely by nurses in emergency department (ED) triage along with vital signs monitoring. Increasing evidence indicates that prompt pain evaluation improves the whole quality of subsequent care. Findings from studies investigating the use of scales for pain evaluation, in addition to the experience gained in clinical practice, suggest to treat all patients presenting a pain intensity major than 4 [2] (scale’s range from 0 – no pain to 10 – the worst pain experienced). However, the myth that analgesic treatments would mask symptoms and delay diagnosis in some cases (i.e. children with acute abdominal disease) still frightens physicians and nurses. Therefore, pain reduction is often not considered as a primary task to be accomplished by the ED team [3].