Clinically significant pain is experienced by just over a third of all hospitalised patients, affecting around a half of surgical and a quarter of medical admissions.

Context Despite advancements in pain control, patients’ experience of pain continues to be a major problem. There have been no hospitalwide studies conducted on pain levels of whole populations of patients admitted to different clinical settings and monitored across time. This study involved examining patients’ intensity of pain at different times during their inpatient stay. The authors explored clinically significant pain (CSP), which they defined as patients’ pain scores that were in the severe or moderate range.