Pedia Pain Focus

When the gold standard for pain assessment is verbal report, children's pain assessment and management requires specific knowledge and understanding.  Children at these important stages of growth create key memories-- and the last thing we need is a whole generation of children that associate getting medical attention with pain.   Globally, when children come in to the emergency room, pain is a component of their presentation 50 to 80% of the time. As medical practitioners, prioritizing the critical elements of a child’s illness should be the main concern-- but we also must ease their pain and suffering related to their health condition and prioritize minimizing their procedural pain.   In this episode, Samina Ali, MD, a pediatric emergency medicine physician and pain expert at the Stollery Children’s Hospital and University of Alberta, Canada shares her clinical and research experience in pediatric pain. Realizing that emergency room visits and procedures may have just as much capability to distress and trau