Pain, Pain, Go Away! Evidence-Based Review of Developmentally Appropriate Pain Assessment for Children in a Postoperative Setting

Assessment and management of pain in children with orthopaedic injuries can be difficult, especially in the postoperative period. Factors such as developmental stage of the child, medications used intraoperatively and postoperatively, patient anxiety, and perceptions of family members and nurses caring for the patient can affect the accuracy of pain assessment in this population. The purposes of this article were to provide an overview of developmentally appropriate pain assessment tools, to describe factors that can affect the perception of pain, and to perform a pain assessment postoperatively in the pediatric orthopaedic patient.