Pain resulting from physical trauma and surgical procedures is very strong. In elderly patients, especially those with impaired communication or cognitive damage, it is assessed rarely or not at all. The importance of pain assessment is reflected in quality supervision and adequate treatment which decrease complications and speed up recovery. 
The aim of the study was to determine the metric characteristics (reliability and validity) of the Abbey Pain Scale on a population of elderly patients with impaired communication in Croatia and to demonstrate the correlation between the assessed acute pain level and analgesia efficacy.
The sample consisted of 31 patients above the age of 65 hospitalized after a femur fracture atthe Trauma Department of University Hospital Centre “SestreMilosrdnice” in Zagreb, Croatia. The Abbey Pain Scale, developed by professor Jennifer Abbey at Queensland University in Australiawas used for pain assessment. The patients’ mental status was evaluated using Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). The reliability of the Abbey Pain Scale was confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of internal consistency whose value was acceptable at 0.561.
For the purpose of determining the validity of the Abbey Pain Scale, the results of this assessment were correlated with patients' self-assessment using Visual Analogue Scale (VAS).The correlation of pain assessment after analgesia was high and significant, which leads to the conclusion that the Abbey Pain Scale is a convenient tool for assessing pain intensity in patients with impaired communication due to good metric characteristics of validity and reliability. This study has demonstrated its effectiveness in assessing pain, which was indirectly related to satisfactory analgesia.

ABBEY PAIN SCALE FOR ASSESSMENT OF HIP FRACTURE - RELATED PAIN IN PATIENTS WITH DIFFICULT COMMUNICATION