What's pain assessment?

Assessment of acute pain is likely to include questions about what caused your pain, what parts of your body are affected, how bad it is, what it is stopping you doing. This is often a physical assessment which may include asking what you have tried to help ease the pain. This helps the healthcare professional consider what options such as medicines, physical therapy or surgery might help you.

When your pain persists longer than 3 months and is becoming "chronic" pain the assessment is likely to become more holistic. By "holistic" we mean it will look at you as a whole person and how pain is impacting your life. Don't be surprised if your GP or other healthcare professional starts to ask about sleep, your mood, your social circumstances such as who lives at home with you and are you working, in addition to recarrying out the things from initial assessments.They are not being nosey but are trying to get a good understanding of how pain is impacting your life and what it is stopping you doing so you can start to explore options beyond medicine and surgery that may form part of your agreed care plan.

Preparing for appointments

Healthcare appointments can be overwhelming. In the moment you might forget to ask something that is really important to you. Doing a little preparation for your appointment may help you on the day and can also help your healthcare professional too.

Try writing down in advance what you want to ask. You might want to take someone with you to the appointment to help you remember what was said.

There are some tools you can use in advance which might help with your discussion:

A body chart - you mark out on a body picture all the areas affected by pain.

A pain diary- keeping a note for a few days can help you understand what impacts your pain. You can see when your pain is worse, what activities you were doing before and after it getting worse, what you did to try and ease your pain (e.g. rested/ used heat/ took medicine)- this can all help with considering what changes can be made to improve things.

Pain navigator tools- colleagues at Pain Concern, a charity organisation, in collaboration with patients have developed a tool which can help you plan for good conversations.

Get tool here

What about tests?

Tests such as bloods/ x-rays/MRI's are used by Healthcare Professionals to help understand what might be causing your pain. They are sometimes used to rule out what isn't causing your pain. Your GP and healthcare professionals will determine what tests are needed based on your signs and symptoms. Not all tests are necessary all of the time, especially when the outcome of the test won't affect what the treatment should be.

Often tests don't tell us all the answers. For example an x-ray of a spine of someone with NO back pain may show more "wear and tear" than the x-ray that looks "normal" of someone with chronic back pain. In this case the X-ray outcome won't change the suggested treatment so in theory the patient has had an unnecessary exposure to X-rays.

Your healthcare professional will be happy to discuss tests with you and agree what the right steps to take are.