Pain Management among Nurses

Background Study on Pain Management among Nurses

Nurses need to be well educated in order to develop a positive attitude towards managing the pain patients suffer from and to have enough knowledge needed to relieve that pain. The kind of education needed is one that covers many different kinds of pains as much as possible and considers the severity of pain that patients suffer by incorporating methods of assessing its extent. Failure to have enough education in this context makes nurses unable to ensure positive patient care outcomes (Kholowa, et al., 2017). Samarkandi (2018) considers pain as a symptom of a health disorder that a patient has and healthcare providers use pain as one of the signs in identifying the disorder. As the health disorder progresses, pain becomes chronic and needs to be managed to prevent further complications that lead to lengthened hospital stays and patient suffering. Nurses have a responsibility to manage pain by assessing the pain to determine its severity and relieve it immediately. Lack of effective pain management can make patients become more hopeless and consequently, weaken their response to the treatment given (Drake & Williams, 2017).

PICOT Statement

Can nurses assessing patients’ needs at the hospital (P) getting trained to have the required skills of recognizing, assessing, and relieving the pain (I) compared to the current practice (C) effectively manage patients’ pain to improve their recovery (O) over a period of three months’ time (T)?

The Purpose and Objectives of the Project

When people experience pain and are unable to manage it using home remedies, they seek healthcare. Pain should not be taken for granted; instead, it should be attended to immediately. Nurses attend to patients first, understand their needs, and find the best way to help them. Since pain is not measurable, nurses need to believe what their patients inform them about their experiences then assess it in order to manage it well. There are times when other basic body examinations such as blood pressure may not indicate a health problem and in such cases, nurses may fail to have the right attitude towards believing what patients are informing them and to address it. More so, it is at this point also, where nurses struggle to know how to assess the pain, determine its severity, and give the right medication. Nurses are obligated to manage their patients’ pain effectively, otherwise, they may face a legal liability (Keller, 2016). The purpose of the evidence-based project is to establish how educational programs on pain management can be improved using the current practice to make nurses become more skilled in recognizing, assessing, and relieving patients’ pain. In particular, in situations where other basic body examinations do not show any sign of health problem. The objective of the project is to use knowledge obtained from the best current evidence to improve pain management education by over 90 percent in order to have a rare number of cases where pain has progressed to become chronic.

Why Pain Management Education in Nursing needs to be improved using Evidence-Based Practice

Pain management is an important part of patient care and it is still ineffective in helping many different patients having acute pain. The weakness according to Glowacki (2015) is caused by a lack of the required proficiency and a uniform way of managing patients’ pain. The use of evidence-based practice to improve pain management is important because it provides researchers with an opportunity to improve knowledge from the new clinical solutions they are introduced to by other literature. Since every patient needs individualized care, nurses need to test the reliability, validity, and applicability of the recent clinical practices and make changes where needed in an effort to have customized solutions for each patient’s pain. Ung et al. (2016) support that by concluding that there is no standardized instrument in addressing patients’ pain because of diverse types of pain.

References

Drake, G. & Williams, A. C. (2017). Nursing education interventions for managing acute pain in hospital settings: A systematic review of clinical outcomes and teaching methods. Pain Management Nursing, 18(1), 3-15.

Glowacki, D. (2015). Effective pain management and improvements in patients’ outcomes and satisfaction. Critical Care Nurse, 35(3), 33-41.

Keller, A. (2016). What every nurse needs to know about pain management. Retrieved from https://dailynurse.com/what-every-nurse-needs-to-know-about-pain-management/.

Kholowa, E. T., Chimwaza, A. F., Majamanda, M. D., & Maluwa, A. O. (2017). Nurses’ knowledge and attitudes towards pain management in children admitted in the pediatric department of Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, Blantyre, Malawi. JBM, 5(6), 46-59. Doi: 10.4236/jbm.2017.56005.

Samarkandi, O. A. (2018). Knowledge and attitudes of nurses toward pain management. Saudi Journal of Anaesthesia, 12(2), 220-226.

Ung, A., Salamonson, Y., Hu, W. & Gallego, G. (2016). Assessing knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes to pain management among medical and nursing students: A review of the literature. British Journal of Pain, 10(1), 8-21.