Pain management nursing : official journal of the American Society of Pain Management Nurses
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Quality of care gains transparency with the help of performance indicators. For Dutch nursing homes, the current set of performance indicators does not include pain. To determine the feasibility of pain assessment as performance indicator, information about pain prevalence and analgesic prescription in one nursing home was collected. ⋯ Residents with substantial pain significantly more often received analgesics (p = .007). Results suggest that pain assessment is feasible in a nursing home and would stimulate staff attention to pain. Further investigation is necessary to find out if a pain algorithm is feasible and will lead to improved pain treatment.
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This article reports a study of adolescents' narrated experiences of undergoing scoliosis surgery. Six adolescents were interviewed. Open and semistructured questions were asked, and a qualitative content analysis of the text was performed. ⋯ The findings of this study suggest that perioperative care of adolescents during scoliosis surgery needs to be optimized. To improve patients' psychologic preparation before surgery pediatric nurses should learn more about the individual patient and make care plans from a holistic perspective. Follow-up after discharge should address emotional, social, and physical aspects of the adolescent's health.
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Fatigue is a common symptom associated with neuropathic pain (NP) and can have negative consequences on psychosocial functioning, physical endurance, and quality of life. Recent evidence indicates that immune activation modulated through the increased release of proinflammatory cytokines can predict fatigue in some patient populations. Although earlier studies have shown that immune activation is a pathophysiologic feature of NP, there have been no studies to examine the relationship between immune activation and fatigue in persons with NP. ⋯ Multivariate analyses of variance revealed that individuals with moderate to high levels of fatigue differed from those with the lowest levels of fatigue in psychologic distress, depressive symptoms, IL-6, and sIL-6R, whereas the differences between moderate and high levels of fatigue were significant for psychologic distress and sIL-6R only. The findings suggest that immune activation affects fatigue severity and possibly other behavioral responses, offering important information when providing care to patients with persistent radiculopathy. The integration of biobehavioral nursing interventions in pain management may have a greater impact on quality of life than treatment focused only on pain.