A 5-year-old child is admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit for the treatment of multiple orthopedic injuries. The child's mother tells the nurse that the child is in extreme pain
Which of the following actions should the nurse take to begin the child's pain treatment? 1. Trust the mother's assessment and treat the child's pain accordingly.
2. Ask the child to describe pain with the Wong-Baker faces scale.
3. Use a verbal descriptor scale to measure the child's pain.
4. Use the visual analog scale to assess pain.
2
Rationale: The Wong-Baker Faces Scale is a tool that can be easily used to assess pain in young children. To use the scale, the nurse asks the child to point to a face that depicts the level of pain that the child is experiencing. Verbal descriptor scales require reading and language abilities above the typical 5-year-old developmental level. The Visual Analog Scale requires abstraction that may be difficult for young children to understand.
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