Systematic review of the Face, Legs, Activity, Cry and Consolability scale for assessing pain in infants and children
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Face, Legs, Activity, Cry and Consolability (FLACC) scale is one of the most widely used behavioural observation pain scales. However, the psychometrics of the scale have not been adequately summarised and evaluated to provide clear recommendations regarding its use. The aim of this study was to rigorously evaluate the reliability, validity, feasibility, and utility of the scale for clinical and research purposes and provide recommendations regarding appropriate use of the scale. Databases searched were MEDLINE, CINAHL, Embase, PsycINFO (using the Ovid, PubMed, and Ebscohost platforms), The Cochrane Database of Systematic reviews and Cochrane Controlled Trials, and Google Scholar. Psychometric evaluation studies reporting feasibility, reliability, validity, or utility data for the FLACC scale applied to children (birth to 18 years) and randomised controlled trials (RCT) using the FLACC scale to measure a study outcome in infants and children. Data extraction included study design, population demographics, and psychometric data. Analysis involved in this study are quality assessment of the psychometric evaluation studies and the RCTs using the COSMIN checklist and the Jadad scale, respectively, and narrative synthesis of all results. Twenty-five psychometric evaluations studies and 52 RCTs were included. The study population, circumstances, and quality of the studies varied greatly. Sufficient data addressing postoperative pain assessment in infants and children exist. Some positive data support the psychometrics of the scale used to assess postoperative pain in children with cognitive impairment. Limited and conflicting data addressing procedural pain assessment exist. Content validity and scale feasibility have had limited psychometric evaluation. There are insufficient data to support the FLACC scale for use in all circumstances and populations to which is currently applied.
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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 | 0.042 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 it