Comprehensive Pain Management Resources – PatchSA
PatchSA Colour Tool for Assessing and Locating Pain in Children
Based on the Eland Colour Tool (Eland & Anderson, 1977) the PatchSA Colour Tool can be used to locate and assess the intensity of pain in children. The tool provides a child’s body that is not race or gender specific.
The download includes instructions on how to use the tool.
Download the PatchSA Body Tool: PatchSA Colour Body Tool with Instructions
The ICPCN Pain Assessment App
The ICPCN Pain Assessment Tool is an app for smartphones that is:
- universally relevant to children of all races and cultures
- provides intuitive, child friendly and interactive pain scales
- tracks and measures the child’s pain type and levels over an extended period of time.
The app is available to download for free from the Google Play Store for android phones and the Apple iStore.
Learn more here
Join PainSA
PainSA is a chapter of the International Association for the Study of Pain. Their mission is to improve all aspects of pain management in Southern Africa.
Join PainSA: https://painsa.org.za
Train Pain Academy
Train Pain is a not-for-profit organisation formed to deliver high quality pain education to health care professionals involved in the management of acute and simple chronic pain in normal clinical settings. Their mission is to improve knowledge and skills of health care professionals to manage pain – acute and simple chronic in normal clinical settings through providing high quality collaborative pain education.
The Certificate in Pain Management is an educational initiative offered by the Train Pain Academy NPO with the goal of improving the knowledge and skills of healthcare professionals managing patients in their clinical practice. Candidates will graduate once they have completed 6 modules in a period of 3 years and passed all the voluntary exams.
Visit their website to learn more: http://trainpainacademy.co.za/
Pain Assessment and Management in Children’s Palliative Care
This course, available on the Patch Acadamy Learning Platform, offers people working with or caring for children who have life-threatening or life-limiting conditions knowledge on how to recognise, assess and manage pain in children, with particular relevance to children with life-threatening and life-limiting illnesses.
The Assessing and Managing Children’s Pain`course covers the following key elements:
- The meaning of total pain.
- Definitions and classifications of pain according to duration, type and cause.
- How to recognise pain in children.
- Types of pain children experience.
- How to complete a thorough pain assessment.
- How to use age-appropriate pain rating scales.
- General principles of pain management.
- Using morphine and co-analgesics.
- Managing procedural pain in children and neonates.
Learn more and register for the course here: Assessing and Managing Children’s Pain – Patch Academy (patchsa.org)
Below you will find a number of links to downloadable resources on pain and symptom management in children’s palliative care.
Basic Symptom Control in Paediatric Palliative Care 2022 (10th edition)
Basic Symptom Control in Paediatric Palliative Care is a key clinical tool used by children’s palliative care doctors and nurses across the world. It is the only resource of its kind that provides comprehensive guidelines for treating a wide range of symptoms experienced by children with life-limiting or complex health conditions.
Now in its tenth edition (May 2022), has become known as the symptom control ‘industry bible’ for professionals working in the field. It has been developed and edited by Dr Satbir Singh Jassal, with contributions and peer reviews from 30 leading paediatric and palliative care specialists. It provides doctors and nursing staff with an ‘all in one’ reference tool for symptom management and children’s palliative care medicines.
It’s been designed to provide both practical support and hands on clinical information in the acute setting. It’s also been written in language that parents can easily understand, as doctors and nursing staff who care for children in the community often leave a copy in the family home so it is on hand for reference.
Basic Symptom Control in Paediatric Palliative Care is packed with information about how to appropriately treat a wide range of symptoms including: infections, nausea and vomiting, seizures and muscle spasm, as well as pain management. Use the link below to download a PDF of the resource to your device.
Learn more on the Together for Short Lives website
Association for Paediatric Palliative Medicine (APPM) Master Formulary 2024 (6th edition)
The Association for Paediatric Palliative Medicine Master Formulary series represents the first significant attempt to collate all available dosing information to support prescribing in paediatric palliative care in a single volume.
Visit the website to download this resource.
WHO Guidelines on the management of chronic pain in children
The purpose of this guideline is to assist WHO Member States and their partners in developing and implementing national and local policies, regulations, pain management protocols and best practices. It will help countries balance concerns about ensuring access to approprate therapies for pain relief with the harms arising from misuse of medications and other potential adverse effects of interventions for pain managment.
These guidelines focus on physical, psychological and pharmacological interventions for the management of primary and secondary chronic pain in children 0 – 19 years of age.
WHO Guide: Integrating palliative care and symptom relief in paediatrics
A wide range of childhood health problems can generate the need for palliative care and symptom relief including not only advanced noncommunicable disease and HIV/AIDS, but also severe prematurity, birth trauma, congenital anomalies, severe non-progressive disabilities such as paraplegia and quadriplegia, drug-resistant tuberculosis and injuries. Paediatric palliative care requires special knowledge and skills, and it is essential that all providers of primary health care for children and paediatric specialty care possess these competencies.
The contents of this guide are relevant to anyone involved with planning, implementing or managing paediatric palliative care, including officials of United Nations organizations working with children, Ministry of Health officials, public health leaders, hospital managers, nongovernmental organizations, general and specialist paediatricians, surgeons, anaesthesiologists, primary care providers and palliative care providers. It has been developed by a working group of experts in PPC and symptom relief from around the world with extensive experience in working in low and middle income countries.
Pediatric Pain Letter
Pediatric Pain Letter (PPL) provides free, open-access, peer-reviewed commentaries on pain in infants, children and adolescents. It is published online in February, June and October.
Paediatric Pain Profile (PPP)
The Paediatric Pain Profile (PPP) is a behaviour rating scale for assessing pain in children with severe physical and learning impairments. From the website you can download the PPP with instructions for its use.
How to become a P.I. Pain Investigator into Childhood Pain
Dr Annemarie Oberholzer
This book will prepare you to become a PI – Pain Investigator. You will be able to solve some of the mysteries of childhood pain, and you will also get the right tools to handle painful experiences. It explores the mystery of pain as this is crucial in understanding pain.
Download as a PDF: PEP-booklets – PEProgram