Checklist for Determining Severity of Pain and Type and Dosage of Analgesics Administered to Patients Undergoing Breast Surgeries

Controlling acute pains requires proper diagnosis and prescription of appropriate drugs. Hence, it is quite necessary to develop a systematic checklist containing all factors affecting the acute postoperative pain or any acute pain associated with breast cancer in order to determine the type and dosage of analgesics administered to the patients. The aim of the present study was the design, and psychometric and pilot execution of a checklist for determining the severity of pain, as well as the type and dosage of analgesics administered to patients who underwent breast surgeries.

The present methodological study was conducted in Tabriz from 2018 to 2019. The participants consisted of 340 patients who were selected based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The study was carried out in four stages including interviews with patients and the elicitation of experts’ views and opinions, checklist validity assessment, the finalization of the items, and finally, questionnaire reliability assessment. Eventually, the data were statistically analyzed using the inter-cluster correlation test and the Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20) in SPSS-19.

In the first stage, a 100-item checklist was designed, which included 4 subscales (i.e., severe, relatively severe pain, moderate, and mild pain). Then, 66 items were eliminated due to the low content validity ratio and content validity index (CVI). The final checklist contained 34 items with an S-CVI/Ave of 0.941, as well as an inter-cluster correlation test (P=0.001) and internal consistency of 0.921.

The final checklist entitled “Pain Diagnosis and Drug Prescription for Breast Cancer Patients” was an appropriate tool for the precise determination of the severity of pain in addition to the type and dosage of postoperative analgesics.