For the assessment of pain I also often use the FLACC scale. We have a lot of severely disabled children so this tends to be the tool I use the most. For the older and higher functioning children I use the Wong Baker Faces Pain Scale. The other day I used the PatchSA colour body tool. This worked really well and the results were quite interesting. I will definitely be using it more in future and showing the nurses in the unit this tool as well.
We also find that the nurses are not really using the different pain scales enough. I am not sure if it is possibly more that they do not know fully how to administer them. At each child’s bed we have a file that we call the Journey pack. In this file we put information sheets, bed exercise programmes etc. My thought is to possibly do the PatchSA colour body tool and then put this in that file for the nurses and doctors to see. I will redo the tool weekly and then the team can see the changes weekly as well. First prize would be to put this tool above the patients bed but with POPIA the file would probably be safer. Any thoughts on this?
