Journal of advanced nursing
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The assessment and control of pain in elderly patients present unique problems. Old people are likely to experience more pain, both chronic and acute, than their younger counterparts. ⋯ This paper discusses issues specific to pain in elderly people, and suggests that wide ranging and careful assessments are needed. Benefits can be achieved not only from the appropriate use of analgesic drugs, but also physical and psychological therapies.
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Clinical Trial Controlled Clinical Trial
Preparing children and families psychologically for day surgery: an evaluation.
The increasing use of ambulatory care settings for children's surgery places more responsibility on parents for psychological preparation of children for surgery and for their post-operative care. This paper describes the evaluation of a pre-admission programme to prepare children between the ages of 3 and 15 years and their families psychologically for day surgery. Seventy-five families comprised the study sample, 23 in the programme group and 53 in the non-intervention group. ⋯ Children and parents with previous surgical experience reported higher levels of pre-surgical anxiety than inexperienced families. Families reported the physicians and day surgery nurse as their primary sources of information and rated the day surgery nurse highest in their satisfaction with information received. Implications for practice, particularly for meeting the needs of young children and out-of-town families, are discussed.
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This paper reports on the results of two studies conducted to further validate the Abu-Saad Paediatric Pain Assessment Tool, a Dutch-language questionnaire developed to assess pain in school-age children. Children of 5 to 15 years of age reported in the first study their post-operative pain before and after the administration of analgesic medication using word descriptors of pain, the 10-cm scale, the Oucher, and a visual analogue scale (VAS). ⋯ In the second study, the correlations between pain and fear, a concurrently used measure with the pain instruments, were low, substantiating the discriminant validity of the pain tool. The significance of the results in relation to instrument development and multidimensional pain assessment in children are further discussed and elaborated.