Anchoring Patients Pain Scores in the Emergency Department

CHRISTUS Health

Status

Completed

Conditions

Back Pain

Joint Pain

Chest Pain

Neck Pain

Muscle Pain

Headache

Abdominal Pain

Treatments

Other: Measurement of Pain

Study type

Observational

Funder types

Other

Identifiers

NCT04717518

2020-132

Details and patient eligibility

About

The proposed research will be a prospective, observational study to test the hypothesis that anchoring will affect verbal pain scores in the emergency department. There will be a small retrospective aspect to this study to obtain patient satisfaction ratings.

Full description

The investigators will evaluate a convenience sample of patients presenting to the ED with a complaint of pain. Patients will be consented for participation and will fill out a brief survey concerning the current visit in the ED. There will be two forms of the survey. Participants will be randomly assigned to one of the two survey forms. Participants will first be asked if their pain score for this visit is greater than or less than an anchor number provided. In this survey, the investigators will use 20 and 80 as our anchoring numbers. The participants will then have a follow up question asking them to estimate their pain score on a 0-100 scale. Investigators will then perform a chart review to determine patient satisfaction scores for that specific visit to determine if the anchoring effect has any input on patient satisfaction scores.

Enrollment

108 patients

Sex

All

Ages

18+ years old

Volunteers

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

18 years of age or older
Presenting to the ED with a chief complaint of any type of pain

Exclusion criteria

Under 18 years of age
Refusal to consent
Incarcerated patients
Pregnant patients
Unable to complete survey secondary to clinical instability, severe pain, or disorientation determined by a study physician