Su Linn Hlaing1, Kyaw Linn1
1) Myanmar
Pain in children is frequently under-recognized or under-treated especially in resource poor setting like Myanmar. The difficulty in quantifying and qualifying pain in young children, altogether with misconception and misjudgements, may place this population at risk for inadequate pain management.
This study was designed to compare Behavioural Pain Assessment Scale (FLACC) with the child's self-report (Wong-Baker FACES) in Myanmar children.
This was hospital-based, cross-sectional observational study and was carried out at Yangon Children's Hospital in 2007 and total 182 children were included. Pain assessment was done by 2 pain assessment scales in children aged 3 – 7 years who have had venepunture and in those who had undergone various types of surgery. Interrater reliability was determined by two observers (the primary investigator and another medical person who have been trained how to use a FLACC scale) independently.
The youngest and oldest age of child were 36 and 84 months respectively (mean of 60.43, 5D+ - 17 .1). When accessing pain in children of (3-5 yrs ) by WB(self report) , FLACC(Pi) and FLACC (Ao) (behavioural score) , the mean scores of 2.7 ,6.1 and 6.2 were obtained respectively which all were higher than the mean cores obtained in older children and they were statistically significant. Similarly, higher pain scores were observed in each categories of two pain assessment tools when accessing pain in children of 3– 5yrs. Younger age group experienced more pain than the older group and previous exposure to pain did not influence on the intensity of pain. Moderate agreement between interrater reliability was seen. There was moderate correlation of two pain scores in children with procedure related pain and high correlation in assessing post operative pain. It was anticipated that this study would contribute to have better management of pain in Myanmar children since this is the first study on pain in Myanmar children.
It was declared that there was no conflicts of interest relavent to this study
