Welcome to the PPP website


The Paediatric Pain Profile (PPP) is a behaviour rating scale for assessing pain in children with severe physical and learning impairments.

From this website you can

• Find out about the development of the Paediatric Pain Profile.
• Download the Paediatric Pain Profile with instructions for its use.
• Order bound paper copies of the Paediatric Pain Profile.
• Find links to other websites relevant to health care and to children's pain.

Background to the study:

Severe physical and learning impairment is a feature of many chronic and disabling conditions in children. These children have many potential sources of pain. Pains may arise from the disease process itself (e.g. neuropathic pain or muscle spasm), be secondary to the disease (e.g. musculo-skeletal pain or pain from reflux oesophagitis) or incidental (e.g. tooth ache or otitis media). However, because the children have difficulty in communicating their pain it can go unrecognized and untreated. It is the child's behaviour often, rather than their verbal report, which has to be interpreted to determine if they have pain. Because it can be difficult sometimes for parents and for health care professionals to distinguish which behaviours do indicate pain and to follow the progress of pain relieving treatments, we have developed a pain assessment scale specifically for this population of children