Compliance evaluation in the parents of inpatients by keeping the pain intensity diaries
2 Department of Neuropharmacology, Valdman Institute of Pharmacology I. P. Pavlov First St. Petersburg State Medical University, St. Petersburg, Russia
Summary
Introduction
Self-filled diaries kept by a patient or caregiver are an effective method for clinical dynamics evaluation in both outpatient and inpatient settings. The real-time data collection is better for pain intensity monitoring than retrospective data analysis for each 24-hour period as the latter is biased by a number of factors such as variability in pain intensity or change in pain’s emotional perception when filling the questionnaire from memory. Due to this range of problems associated with the latter, we conducted a study aimed at diary keeping compliance in pediatric inpatients.
Patients and methods
A total of 64 pediatric patients aged 2.4 to 17 years supervised by pain management team were given cards with Wong-Baker face scale and visual analogue scale with additional diaries for baseline and breakthrough pain assessment. These diaries were filled in each 6 hours during the all analgesia period. The median follow-up period was 8 days.
Results
Overall compliance rate was 72%. All the patients were divided into 4 groups according to diary-filling compliance degree. The 0-25% group consisted of 25 patients with median age of 7.5 years, the 26-50% group of 9 patients had median age of 7 years; the 51-75% group contained 6 children with median age of 10 years, and the group of 76-100% consisted of 33 children with median age of 9 years.
Conclusions
The results obtained may indicate that an influence of patients’ age on his/her caregivers pain diary keeping compliance. This may be due to communicative abilities for children of different age. For more precise conclusions an additional research is required.
Keywords
Pain intensity assessment, pain diary, pediatrics, analgesia.
