Deborah Tomlinson , Carl L . von Baeyer , Jennifer N . Stinson and Lillian Sung Children

Author's response to reviews Title: A Systematic Review of Symptom Assessment Scales in Children with Cancer Authors:

Numerical rating scale for self-report of pain intensity in children and adolescents: recent progress and further questions.

Until very recently there has been an anomaly in the assessment of the intensity of pediatric pain. The most commonly used self-report scale is the one that, up to now, has had the smallest amount of supportive research. This scale, the numerical rating scale (NRS), is administered by asking patients to say a number, usually from 0 to 10, to express the intensity of their pain. Compared with we...

Training highly qualified health research personnel: The Pain in Child Health consortium

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Pain in Child Health (PICH) is a transdisciplinary, international research training consortium. PICH has been funded since 2002 as a Strategic Training Initiative in Health Research of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, with contributions from other funding partners and the founding participation of five Canadian universities. The goal of PICH has been to crea...

The painful truth: A review of the clinical use of skin conductance monitoring for postoperative pain assessment

Accurate assessment of pain intensity remains a critical aspect of successful pain management. Currently, the most widely used method of assessment involves various self-report scales (Williamson & Hoggart, 2005). Self-report scales rely on a cooperative, reliable patient and therefore are of limited use with unconscious, preverbal or cognitively impaired individuals. For verbal children, there...

Defining bloodstream infections related to central venous catheters in patients with cancer: a systematic review.

The objective of this review was to determine whether consistent definitions were used in published studies of bloodstream infections due to central venous catheters in patients with cancer (ie, catheter-related or catheter-associated bloodstream infections). Review of 191 studies reporting catheter-related or catheter-associated bloodstream infections in patients with cancer revealed a lack of...