Asessment of nurses' tools for patients' pain assessment at federal teaching in mehr general hospital, Iran

The study was conducted to assess the tools used by nurses in assessment of their patients' pains using a cross - sectional descriptive research design. The instrument used was a questionnaire developed by researchers with validity of 0.86. 450 nurses used in the study were randomly selected from Federal Teaching In Mehr General Hospital. The results show that majority of the nurses use mainly patients' verbal report of pains (87%) and simple descriptive pain intensity scale (57%) as their pain assessment tools. This revealed that despite the number of pain assessment tools available nurses only use the subjective method to assess their patients' pains. It was recommended that intensive training on pain assessment be organized for nurses to improve their use ofpain assessment tools.