ABSTRACT
In busy acute settings there are times when it may be appropriate to simply ask a
patient:
To help patients respond to this last question, some nurses and doctors ask: ‘On
a scale of zero to ten, with zero being no pain and ten being the worse pain you
can imagine, what is your pain?’ Imagining a 0-10 scale when you are anxious,
experiencing intense pain and possibly feeling very ill can be difficult. It is more
effective to show the patient a scale and to ask them to point to the level that their
pain is at. Figure 12.1 is an example of this type of numerical analogue scale.
