Progress of pediatric pain management and sedation in the emergency department

Children usually come to emergency department accompanied with painful conditions and injuries.During the emergence care, additional painful, distressing or unpleasant diagnostic and therapeutic procedures may be required.Emergency doctors are anticipated to provide safe and effective analgesia and sedation for children.This review summarized recent studies on the following aspects: make sure that children do not experience lengthened or additional pain when coming to emergency medical care; at triage use a composite pain assessment tool to assess; aim to provide effective analgesia at the first attempt-use the appropriate drug, dose, and route; choose painless modes of delivery(nasal route, flavoured syrups) if possible; reassess frequently pain scores to make sure that analgesia is effective and allow adequate time for it to work; use non-pharmacological and pharmacological modalities to manage pain; avoid the routine use of unnecessary painful invasive procedures; use topical, local and regional anaesthesia together with proper safe procedural sedation to avoid further pain.