Impact of the Use of the Scale ALGOPLUS® on the Prescriptions of Analgesics in Emergency Department on Patients of 75 Years Old or More

The pain of the elderly is even often unrecognized or trivialized and ignored in spite of its big frequency: the chronic pain affects 50 % of the elderly living at home, 49 to 83 % of those living in institution and 80 % of this population at the end of life.

So in the elderly, the noxious character of the pain is more pregnant than at the young adult. The echo on the acts of the everyday life is fast, the activities decrease, coming to deteriorate the isolation and the dependence: the echo on the psychic state is frequent and the pain is a part of the cause of a confusional state. Finally, the presence of a pain distorts considerably the quality of life and can modify the state general as the desire of life.

The evaluation of the pain appeals to the same strategy as to the younger subject but with some specificities, related more to the pathologies associated with the ageing than with the real age. For that purpose, the investigators have first of all scale of self-assessment as the numerical scale which is adapted to estimate the acute and chronic pains but this scale presents a bias because, certain patients do not express spontaneously their pain and this one must be attentively looked for in case of modification of behavior.

So scales of hetero-evaluation were elaborated to solve the difficulties of detection and to care the pain of the elderly. One of these is the scale Algoplus® (5 items which allow within one minute a good quality evaluation whatever is the place of care) whose objective is the observation of the behavioral changes caused by the acute pain in elderly having communication disorders.

Due to the demographic evolution, emergency departments are more and more frequently a place of consultation of the elderly. Indeed, the elderly represent approximately 10 to 20 % of all the passages in emergency department and 50 % of the patients hospitalized during the passage in the reception of Emergency department are elderly. Elderly care is difficult for a certain number of reasons (vulnerability, accumulation of pathologies and treatments). So, in this context, the evaluation of the presence of pain and its care are difficult in particular at the elderly with communication disorders.

In a preliminary study in the emergency department of the Hospital of Clermont-Ferrand, on 700 patients of more than 75 years old admitted in April 2012, 32 % had a prescription of analgesic while 13 % only had a real quotation of the pain.

The aim of the investigators study is to analyze if the systematic introduction of the scale Algoplus® in the evaluation of elderly during its entrance to emergency department could modify the prescription of analgesic.