Abstract

Oraka N. Gabriel and Igboje Nathan

The study was conducted to evaluate the tools used by nurses in assessment of their patients’ pains using a cross–sectional descriptive research design. The instrument used was questionnaire developed by researchers with Validity of 0.86. 450 nurses used in the study were randomly selected from Federal Teaching Hospital Abakaliki. The results show that majority of the nurses use mainly patients’ verbal report of pains (87%) and simple descriptive pain intensity scale (57%) as their pain assessment tools. This revealed that despite the number of pain assessment tools available, nurses only use the subjective method to assess their patients’ pains. It was recommended that intensive training programme on pain assessment should be organized for nurses to improve their use of pain assessment tools.