Painful Call About the Under-Reporting of Children’s Pain During Humanitarian Crises

Humanitarian crises often require urgent medical care to people of concern. Such medical aid includes assessing and treating acute medical needs and ongoing chronic health conditions. Among the people of concern there are children, who are often the most vulnerable population in humanitarian contexts because they often lack the experience, independence, and cognitive and verbal skills to deal with the ordeals they are facing. These limitations might prevent identification and diagnosis of pain. The under-diagnosis and under-treated pain by health care providers might be also due to the perceived urgency of more acute or life-threatening medical needs with limited medical equipment and personnel, lack of awareness, or assessment tools in such contexts. Additionally, due to issues of anonymity and lack of formal guidelines, there is a severe lack of standardized registration of children’s pain conditions in humanitarian crises. Finally, acute pain is also a predictor of post-traumatic stress disorder, a common outcome in such disasters. We call on health care providers to use standardized scales to assess children’s pain intensity, frequency, and duration, and to treat it appropriately. These will not only reduce children’s physical suffering but may also prevent subsequent risk of PTSD.