Use Of Pain Assessment Tools Research Articles

Changing nursing practice for more effective control of post operative pain through a staff initiated educational programme

Control of post-operative pain can be improved by pre-operative preparation and effective use of pain assessment tools. Staff in a short stay post-operative orthopaedic ward have been reviewing and changing their practice for more effective nursing care. The author describes the changes process in which the staff were actively involved at each stage. This includes the trial and development of the use of a pain assessment tool concurrently with a focused eduational programme and the subsequent development of a pre-operative information giving visit by a nurse from the post-operative unit.

A baseline study for the development of an instrument for the assessment of pain.

This study was designed to establish a foundation for the further development of a pain assessment tool for use in clinical practice. It was earlier reported that there existed a significant difference in the intensity of the words pain, ache and hurt and that each of these concepts had their own specific sensory and affective word descriptors. This study was designed to: 1 find out if the above results could be verified by using subjects with a different background from those included in the previous study; 2 determine the intensity of word descriptors; and 3 determine if patients, nurses and nursing students use the same word descriptors to describe pain-like experiences. Pain assessment tools used were the McGill Pain Questionnaire, a visual analogue scale and a pain, ache and hurt questionnaire. The results of the earlier reported study were confirmed. In addition, a significant difference was found in intensity of the word descriptors. Patients, nurses and nursing students used basically the same word descriptor to describe pain-like experiences. The sensory word descriptors (crushing, sharp, tearing, cutting, penetrating, gnawing, dull, pulling, sore, stinging, pricking and pinching) and the affective word descriptors (dreadful, torturing, killing, unbearable, terrifying, suffocating, exhausting, unhappy, troublesome, annoying, irritating and fearful) are suggested as a foundation upon which a pain assessment tool could be developed for use in clinical practice.