Background: Despite pain being a crucial aspect of urgent-emergency care, the attention of healthcare workers towards this symptom in the Emergency Department (ED) is still inadequate. The aims of this study were to assess children's and their adults accompanier's satisfaction regarding pain management in Italian ED, considering healthcare workers' attention to the symptom as well as the appropriateness and efficacy of treatments received.
Methods: Questionnaires were administered face-to-face by trained interviewers over the period of one weekend in 29 Italian ED. The questionnaires were addressed to children 3-16 years old, assigned a green code at triage, and their adult accompaniers.
Results: Overall, 1581 questionnaires were administered (923 to parents or caregivers, 658 to children). The reported level of attention to pain by the care team was high (57.20%) as was the adults' satisfaction with the pain management (95.01%); a high level of satisfaction was related to the healthcare workers' attention to pain. According to the adults, 73.56% of the healthcare professionals collected accurate information about pain; this was confirmed by the children. Pain was managed by a doctor-and-nurse team in less than half the cases (43.77%). Therapy efficacy was reportedly poor: only 14.01% of children were pain-free when leaving the ED.
Conclusions: Despite increasing understanding of pain and the availability of guidelines and effective analgesics, efficient pain relief in paediatric patients in the ED remains an unfulfilled goal: half of children with pain did not receive any treatments. Therefore the quality of pain management in the ED needs to be improved.