Pain as the neglected patient safety concern: Five years on.
Five years ago, we published a commentary in the Canadian Medical Association Journal arguing that inadequately managed pain in children should be considered an adverse event, a harmful patient outcome. We argued that inadequately managed pain meets the definition of an adverse event and further hypothesized that treating pain as an adverse event may improve care by raising health care administrators and quality improvement experts' awareness of this issue. In this article, we reflect on the progress made in both moving this proposition forward and testing out the concept. We then move on to look at what still needs to be done to ensure that children's pain is managed effectively.
1 Department for Children's Nursing, London South Bank University, London, UK.
Alison
A
Twycross
2 School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Paula
P
Forgeron
3 Departments of Anesthesia, Pain Management and Perioperative Medicine and Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada.|4 Centre for Pediatric Pain Research, IWK Health Centre, Halifax, Canada.
Jill
J
Chorne
2 School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.|5 Clinical Epidemiology Program, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Chantal
C
Backman
3 Departments of Anesthesia, Pain Management and Perioperative Medicine and Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada.|4 Centre for Pediatric Pain Research, IWK Health Centre, Halifax, Canada.
G Allen
GA
Finley
Pain management; adverse event; children; paediatrics