Introduction: Pain complaint comprises the majority of the patient presentations to the emergency department. Temporary symptomatic treatment is applied to the patients presenting to the emergency department for pain complaint. The aim of this study is to determine some of the factors that affect the re-presentation of patients to the emergency department who presented previously for pain complaint.

Material and method: 1021 adult patients who presented to the emergency department for pain complaint were included in the study. Their admission and discharge pain grades were assessed by VAS. The factors affecting the correlation between pain grades and re-presentations were analyzed.

Results: Average admission VAS score of the study patients was 79.2±13.5 mm (scale 20-100) and their average discharge VAS score was 31±19.8 mm (scale 0-100). We observed that age, gender, hour of presentation, pain duration and analgesic usage of patients did not affect their re-presentations. Rate of re-presentation to the emergency department was high for patients suffering from chronic diseases and who present for pain complaint, patients presenting for chest pain and patients to whom drug treatment was applied. We found out that while admission pain grades have no effect on re-presentation, re-presentation rate was high for patients who had high discharge pain grades.

Conclusion: Decreasing the pain grade of the patients who present to the emergency department for pain complaints as far as possible will decrease their re-presentation rates. Therefore, it is important to effectively stop the pain even when the emergency department is busy.