A study on the Comparison of Pain Assessment Scales used in a Tertiary Care Centre.

Pain is a major public health issue throughout the world and represents a major clinical, social and economic problem. It is a single centre, prospective, observational study done at Apollo hospitals, Jubilee hills, Hyderabad for a period of 6 months (January’17-June’17). A total of 121 patients were considered of the age group (18-80) years with complaints of pain admitted in Medical ICU, Neurology ICU, Surgical ICU, Cardiac ICU and General wards. The cases were observed for types of pain and to compare the agreement between the Numerical Rating Scale (NRS), Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), Verbal Rating Scale (VRS) & Faces scale in non- sedated patients & Critical Care Pain Observation Scale (CPOT) & Behavioral Pain Scale (BPS) in sedated patients. Out of 121 patients the most common type of pain was nociceptive pain. Kappa test was used to assess agreement between scales. A substantial agreement of 0.63 was seen between NRS and Faces (uni-dimensional scale) in non-sedated patients while almost perfect agreement of 0.92 was seen between CPOT and BPS (multi-dimensional scale) in sedated patients. On comparing scales it was observed that greater agreement was between NRS and Faces while assessing pain in non-sedated patients and CPOT and BPS while assessing pain in sedated patients. Therefore, it can be said that the association or use of these scales might improve in better pain score assessment which would ease the pain management practices in a hospital setting.