Critical Care Pain Score

For such critical care patients, special licensed nurses called critical care or intensive care nurses are employed who look after the needs of the patient in the best possible way with the vast body of knowledge that they have acquired over the years.

During such care for these patients, the nurses also have to keep assessing the level of pain and suffering in the patients. This is especially so for those who cannot speak and cannot communicate effectively. This complicates critical care pain measurement.  Generally, critical care pain is evaluated with the Numerical Rating Scale or NRS, the Behavioral Pain Scale or BPS, and the Visual Analog Scale or VAS. Despite these rational scales of measuring pain, it is not always reliable enough to measure pain in the diverse situations and environments for each patient in the ICU.

There have been several attempts by researchers to come up with a standardized method of pain evaluation and make sure which patient should be evaluated with the appropriate score. The different kinds of environments under which patients may be in an ICU are those under ventilation, responsive and unresponsive. It is seen that the NRS and the VAS can be successfully used to evaluate acute pain, but not in mechanically ventilated patients in the ICU.

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