Comparison of Verbal Rating Scale and Numerical Rating Scale in Post Anesthesia Care Unit

In the postanesthetic care unit(PACU), patients who are recovering from anesthesia are not easy to communicate with. Accordingly, accurate evaluation of acute surgical pain is difficult for PACU patients in spite of severe postoperative pain. Therefore, pain evaluation is clinically important and challenging in PACU. The pain evaluation tool should be simple and easy to understand for accurate assessment. Among the most commonly used pain assessment methods are numerical rating scale(NRS), visual analogue scale(VAS) and verbal rating scale(VRS). These three methods have proved valid for clinical situations in many studies. VRS appears to be easier to understand than the other two methods for patients in PACU. The purpose of this study is to compare NRS and VRS in PACU patients.