Pediatrics: Major Abdominal Surgery
- DOI:
- 10.1093/med/9780190856649.003.0022
Following surgery, pediatric patients suffering from pain warrant consistent and frequent pain assessments. This chapter describes a variety of scales that can be used and that must be tailored to the developmental stage of the child. Examples of commonly used pediatric scales include the Neonatal Pain, Agitation and Sedation Scale (N-PASS); Face, Legs, Activity, Cry, Consolability (FLACC); Numerical Rating Scale (NRS); and the Wong Baker FACES Pain Scale. In the setting of open abdominal surgery, certain interventional techniques (continuous epidural, peripheral truncal blockade) can be used to significantly decrease pain and must be tailored to the individual patient and specific surgical subtype. Separate from interventional techniques, older children may also use patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) devices to deliver systemic opioids. For patients who are too young or are unable to press a PCA device, a variety of nurse-controlled analgesic protocols exist to deliver such systemic analgesic therapies.
Access to the complete content on Oxford Medicine Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
