Time from Pain Assessment to Pain Intervention
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Updated: Oct 28, 2025

Determining Pain Detection and Tolerance Thresholds Using an Integrated, Multi-Modal Pain Task Battery
Published on: April 14, 2016
Renee C B Manworren1, Ata Atabek
1Author Affiliations: Director of Nursing Research and Professional Practice (Dr Manworren), Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Dr Manworren), Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois; and Undergraduate Student (Atabek), Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to describe factors that influence nurses' time from pain assessment to intervention for acute postsurgical pain.
Background:
Nurses' time is a limited resource that must be optimized to manage patients' pain within budget constraints. Little is known about processes and activities nurses negotiate to manage pain.
Methods:
Human factors engineering and ethnography were used to quantify factors influencing time from pain assessment to intervention.
Results:
On the basis of 175.5 observation hours, nurses spent 11% of shifts (mean, 83 minutes) on pain care activities. Time from alert to intervention with PRN analgesics or biobehavioral strategies for 58 cases ranged from 0 to 48 minutes (mean, <11 minutes). Five factors influenced timeliness.
Conclusions:
Nurses most efficiently managed postsurgical pain by giving analgesics ordered PRN on a scheduled basis. Nurse leaders can empower prompt responses to patients' pain through delegation, process improvements, real-time monitoring, and prescriber engagement.
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