Backgrounds and Aims Pain is a common cause for which patients seek treatment and an unpleasant side effect of our treatment. Young children are not able to express their pain. It is the care-givers responsibility to assess and manage their pain. Care-givers perception of the child’s pain depends on various factors. We studied the perception and knowledge regarding pain amongst nursing staff at our centre. We compared these across three groups as per their exposure to pediatric patients (routinely, occasionally or rarely exposed to pediatric patients).

Method Consensually validated questionnaire containing combination of questions from basic (must know) and advanced (nice to know) areas of knowledge about nursing pediatric patients and questions related to nurses’ perception about pain in pediatric patients was administered to eligible nursing staff at Rural Tertiary Care Hospital in Western India. The responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics and comparisons were made by chi-square test.

Result 351 usable questionnaires (83.37%) out of 421 were returned. The knowledge of the nurses regarding pain was observed to be poor. 60% of all the nurses had complete knowledge of all the basic questions asked. Only 3.1% had answered all of the five advanced questions correctly, while 96.9% of the nurses had answered one or more questions incorrectly.

Conclusions The deficit in knowledge and shortcomings in perception needs to be addressed and steps need to be taken to improve the nurse’s knowledge and modify beliefs and attitude of the nursing staff towards the pain of the pediatric patients.