Use of the Pain Assessment Checklist for Seniors with Limited Ability to Communicate-II (Pacslac-II) by People Who Are Not Health Professionals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pain is prevalent among older adults but it is often underestimated and undertreated, especially in older people with dementia. Patients with severe dementia are likely to suffer from untreated pain because of their limited ability to report it. Observational methods of pain assessment, such as the Pain Assessment Checklist for Seniors with Limited Ability to Communicate-II (PACSLAC-II; Chan, Hadjistavropoulos, Williams, & Lints-Martindale, 2014), have been shown to be valid indicators of pain in this population when completed by health professionals or other trained personnel (Fuchs-Lacelle, Hadjistavropoulos, & Lix, 2008; Zwakhalen, Hamers, Abu-Saad, & Berger, 2006). With growing demands, informal caregivers who are laypersons are an untapped assessor group, although they often have the primary responsibility for seniors with dementia. The goal of this investigation was to compare the behavioural pain assessment ability of persons who are not health professionals to that of experienced nursing staff. Videos depicting dementia patients expressing pain were presented to professional and non-professional participants. Both groups (i.e., laypersons and long-term care staff) were shown the video segments in random order and then completed the PACSLAC-II, the Pain Assessment in Advanced Dementia Scale (PAINAD; Warden, Hurley, & Volicer, 2003) as an index of concurrent validity, and a Global Rating Scale for each video segment. The responses of the two groups were compared. As expected, both laypeople and nurses were able to effectively differentiate painful from non-painful situations. Both groups were also able to discriminate between gradations of pain (i.e., baseline, mild, moderate, severe). Moreover, tool internal consistency was compared as a function of professional and non-professional status. Results confirmed the validity and reliability among non-professional adults when using the PACSLAC-II and the PAINAD to assess pain. Exploratory analyses did not identify a systematic relationship between demographic characteristics of participants and pain ratings provided. It was concluded that, as hypothesized, both instruments can be used for the assessment of pain in patients with dementia by laypeople. This study is the first to validate these instruments for use by laypeople. These findings will help to promote the assessment of pain in community settings, thus facilitating pain treatment and earlier detection of symptoms in older adults with dementia. Keywords: Pain; Dementia; Older Adults; Observational Pain Assessment
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".