When you’re tending to a patient in an emergency, you need to assess their symptoms and the severity of their potential injuries. OPQRST is one of the best mnemonic devices for this.
OPQRST is popular among nurses, EMTs, medical assistants, paramedics, and other health care professionals to learn about a patient’s pain and symptoms. This makes it one of the most critical mnemonic in the paramedic’s toolkit.
Find out what OPQRST stands for, and how you can use it to assess a patient during an emergency.
A mnemonic is a memory device that uses a pattern of letters, associations, or ideas to help an individual remember something. Each letter of OPQRST stands for an essential question in the patient’s assessment.
OPQRST is easy to remember, because these letters follow each other in the alphabet.
Find out what exact questions you can ask to get a clearer picture in each category.
The “O” in OPQRST stands for onset. The healthcare professional is trying to determine what brought on the symptom or the pain.
Some of the questions you can ask of a patient include:
The “P” stands for provocation or palliation. The questions to these answers can reveal if the pain or symptom is better or worse in certain situations.
You can base your questions in this category around these three topics:
The “Q” stands for quality. Pain can be shooting, crushing, sharp, burning, aching, dull, or throbbing.
Questions can be leading using those adjectives, or they can also be open-ended like: “Could you describe the pain for me?”
You also need to find out about the pattern of the pain. Is it constant or intermittent?
With these questions, you won’t just find out what the underlying issue is. You’ll also get a glimpse into the patient’s experience.
The “R” stands for the region and the radiation of the pain. This is how you can determine where the pain is located on the patient’s body and whether or not it radiates or moves into another area.
There are two main kinds of pain patients can report:
When helping a patient determine the location of pain, a body map can help them better illustrate pain distribution. If you suspect spinal nerve injury, a dermatome map can help assess the extent of the damage.
The “S” stands for the severity of the pain or symptom.
To determine severity, you can ask your patient to give a description of the pain using a pain score .
A typical pain score uses a scale of zero to ten, with zero representing no pain at all and ten representing the worst pain possible.
If the patient has difficulty comparing their pain, ask them about previous injuries that they can compare the current pain to.
Finally, the “T” stands for time. Here are some of the critical timing questions that you canask:
Hold on! Who added an extra letter to OPQRST?
Sometimes the letter “A” will be added to this common medical mnemonic, changing it to OPQRST-A. In this case, the “A” stands for “associated manifestations.”
An associated manifestation would be a symptom accompanying the underlying pain that the healthcare professional is attempting to address. Think of this as a missing piece of an incomplete puzzle.
To search for any associated manifestations, you can ask the patient a question like:
“Have you noticed any other symptoms accompanying the symptom of pain?”
For example, if the patient complains of chest pain, the healthcare professional will want to know if the patient is experiencing increased sweating, nausea, or difficulty breathing.
This unexpected symptom can sometimes lead to a better understanding of what the underlying issue is.
Knowing how to use OPQRST during an emergency is crucial for every EMT and paramedic. That’s why teach this in an engaging and memorable way to our students.
If you want to become an EMT or a paramedic, there’s no better place to learn than with Elite Ambulance in Chicago .
We combine theory and practice to help our students get a thorough understanding of what it takes to save lives.
Join our course today and be part of the EMS community!
