The ideal pain assessment tool would have the following...

The ideal pain assessment tool would have the following attributes but when you consider these attributes and measure them against the tools available you realise that no one tool has all attributes:

• Sensitive and free from bias;
• Immediate information about accuracy and reliability;
• Distinguishes between pain, unpleasantness and emotion;
• Assesses experimental and clinical pain;
• Absolute rather than relative scales;
• Estimates confidence of predictions.

CORRECTION..... ePAT does! We have come to the rescue!