Abstract

A convenience sample of 60 children, aged five to 12 years, reporting to Kuwait government hospital emergency departments was studied. All were native Arabic speakers. Our aim was to compare the diagnostic usefulness of the pain information provided by children and by accompanying adults when interviewed under standard emergency department conditions. Children were asked to describe their current pain and how it had changed and to signify pain intensity using a 10-point visual analog scale (VAS). Comparable data were then collected from the accompanying adult. Senior clinicians rated these verbal and VAS descriptions for their usefulness in arriving at a diagnosis. Most children provided useful pain information. Mothers received consistently higher scores for their VAS descriptions than their children did; otherwise, the pain data provided by adults were not judged to be significantly more useful. When clinicians and teachers were asked to differentiate which data they thought had been provided by a child and which by the accompanying adult, nearly half of their decisions were wrong.