Journal of advanced nursing
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A self-administered questionnaire was developed to ascertain the criteria that student nurses used to assess children in pain. The sample consisted of 17 second-year registered general nurse students who had just completed their paediatric secondment. The questionnaire required the students to provide their own definition of pain, to rate the pain of four hypothetical children, giving reasons for their ratings and provide data about their assessment of a child they had cared for. ⋯ There was limited reference to either personal episodes of pain or previous nursing experience. In their own assessment of children in pain the students appeared to use all the acknowledged criteria. The use of physiological signs was in some circumstances possibly inappropriate.