Postoperative pain in Danish children: self-report measures of pain intensity

The Oucher and the Poker Chip Tool are two of the most widely used instruments designed to measure children's self-report of pain intensity. Most of the studies dealing with the Oucher and the Poker Chip Tool use North American children as subjects. To establish the versatility of the instruments in patients of various cultural backgrounds and with different types of pain, this study used the Oucher and the Poker Chip Tool with 100 Danish children, age 3 to 15 years, after tonsillectomy. Both the Oucher and the Poker Chip Tool provided easy-to-use devices in clinical practice for the estimation of the intensity of the children's pain. Although the Poker Chip Tool only provides five discrete levels of pain, the strong positive relationships between the pain scores derived from the Oucher and the Poker Chip Tool (r = 0.71-0.79, p < .001) indicate its utility in clinical practice. The Oucher uses actual pictures of a child and therefore demonstrates ethnicity directly. The results of this study suggest that Danish children as well as American children are able to use the Oucher as a method to self-report pain intensity.