Introduction:

specially children. There are barriers to pain assessment of hospitalized children such

as lack of appropriate pain assessment tool, lack of specific regulations and policies

and nurses’ insufficient knowledge and skills. The present study aimed at determining

the effects of establishing a nursing commission of pain management on empowering

nurses within pain assessment process.

Method:

who were recruited in the study through cluster randomized sampling method. The

samples were drawn from Emergency room, Surgery & Orthopedic units of Vali-e

Asr Hospital as the control group and Imam Khomeini Hospital as the intervention

group, in 2007. Data was gathered using questionnaires of demographic information

nurses empowering tools on pain assessment process of children (consisted of

recognition of pain assessment, self reporting of quality and quantity of pain

assessment, pain assessment measurement, checklist on skills of documenting pain

assessment). After taking pretest, nursing commission of pain management for nurses’

empowerment was established, which followed by undertaking a post-test. All

statistics were computed by the SPSS software (version 12).

Results:

assessment was increased from 7.7 to 12.9 in intervention group and from 8.4 to 8.6 in

control group. Regarding self reporting of quality and quantity of pain assessment, the

values turned from 1.9 to 2.8 in intervention group and 2.1 to 2.2 in control group.

Pain assessment measuring increased from 0.11 to 0.72 in intervention group and.10

to 0.10 in control group. Pain assessment documentation skill improved from 0.03 to

0.72 in experimental group while there were no changes in control group (0.03).

Nurses’ empowerment was progressed significantly after establishing the pain

management commission (