Stoplight Pain Scale Comic Book

Helping parents and children communicate about pain

Project Background

In the emergency department, over 90% of children evaluated for injury-induced pain are discharged home. There is growing evidence that pain treatment by parents is inadequate. An emergency medicine physician-researcher asked us to help develop a new pain scale to make conversations and decisions around pain treatment clearer and easier.

Client: Medical College of Wisconsin

Our Work

We developed the Stoplight Pain Scale™, which simplifies response options for children when asked about pain. We also created a comic book about three children with different types of pain. The story models how children can be honest with their parents about pain and how parents can use the pain scale to understand if their children need pain medicine.