Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

One of many difficult issues in veterinary medicine is the assessment of an animal's experience of pain. As a licensed veterinary nurse in Sweden you are obligated by law to work by the concept of evidence based medicine. To achieve this the author of this study sees the need for standardized methods of pain assessment. A Swedish version of Short form of the Glasgow Composite Measure Pain Scale (CMPS-SF) has recently been translated and developed. Furthermore, a psychometric validation needs to be performed to ensure its validity and reliability. The aim of this study was to try the hypothesis according to the generally accepted theory in veterinary medicine that orthopedic surgery causes a higher degree of pain than soft tissue surgery. An additional aim of this study were to compare the results to other validations of the protocol, referring to the study involving the validation of the Glasgow Composite Measure Pain Scale (CMPS) and the study concerning validation of the CMPS-SF in the Netherlands.

Data were collected from five animal hospitals in Sweden and included 60 dogs. This information was processed and validated through a statistical analysis. Licensed veterinary nurses with a bachelor's degree in veterinary nursing from the Swedish University of Agricultural Science made the pain assessments. Practical experience was needed to be able to discuss the usability of the protocol from a user’s perspective; hence some of the pain assessments were made by the author. The dogs were observed one time each during 2-24 hours following extubation, and at the same time a subjective assessment of the dogs sedation level were scored.

The study showed a significant difference in pain score between dogs after orthopedic surgery and dogs recovering from soft tissue surgery. The results are comparable with the findings of the validation of CMPS respectively CMPS-SF in the Netherlands, and therefore indicate that this study can be helpful in a future, complementary psychometric validation of the Swedish version of CMPS-SF.