Introduction:

Pain is an important health problem and the symptom that most often generates a medical consultation. The aim of this study is to describe the prevalence of pain and its intensity in patients who perform a rehabilitation treatment in a third level hospital.

Material and methods:

Observational, cross-sectional, descriptive study. The sample includes 318 patients treated by a rehabilitation technique during a day of February, in 2019.

We studied: Diagnosis. Pain during the last 24 hours and its intensity. Presence and intensity of the pain during the treatment. Characteristics of the pain. Analgesic treatment.

We used the visual analogue scale VAS (0-10) to measure the intensity of the pain.

The statistical analysis were conducted using the IBM SPSS Statistics 21.0 for Windows, with a statistically significant p-value of 0.05.

Results:

Of 318 patients, 94.9 % had pain, average age of 58.7 years old, 67.4 % were women. The musculoskeletal pathologies (88.4 %) and the nociceptive, chronic and intermittent pain were the most frequent cause and type. The average intensity of the maximum pain noticed with VAS was 5.7 and 4.8 during the treatment. The shock waves and the kinesitherapy were the most painful techniques. 36.4 % didn't take any analgesics.

Conclusions:

The prevalence of patients with pain seen in the Rehabilitation Services is very high. It is necessary to set regular checks to identify the pain before and during the treatment techniques, as well as analgesic protocols according to its intensity.

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