Differences in nurses’ perceptions of self-reported pain and the administered morphine dose according to the patient’s facial expression in Korea

This study aimed to compare nurses’ perceptions of self-reported pain, the recorded pain score, and pain treatment according to the patient’s facial expression. In this descriptive cross-sectional survey, the participants were 472 nurses working at a tertiary hospital in Seoul, Korea. A self-report questionnaire presented nurses with a smiling patient complaining of acute post-surgical pain and a grimacing patient with cancer pain, both of whom reported a pain level of 8 out of 10, and asked nurses to indicate their perception of the pain intensity, the pain score that they would record, and the medication that they would provide for each patient. The pain intensity perceived by nurses for the grimacing patient was significantly higher than that for the smiling patient (P