Pain as the neglected patient safety concern: Five years on (April 2016)

Summary

Authors of this article, previous argued that inadequately managed pain in children should be considered an adverse event, a harmful patient outcome. They argued that inadequately managed pain meets the definition of an adverse event and further hypothesised 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, published in the Journal of Child Care Health five years on, they reflect on the progress made in both moving this proposition forward and testing out the concept. They then move on to look at what still needs to be done to ensure that children’s pain is managed effectively.