Pain management nursing : official journal of the American Society of Pain Management Nurses
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Effective acute pain management strategies are important for young adults in order to reduce risk for transition to chronic pain. ⋯ African American young adults report moderate levels of pain intensity and pain interference with function. A significant number report no pain self-management strategies. Focused pain assessment and education about efficacious pain self-management strategies, both pharmacological and complementary, could assist young African Americans to reduce their pain and risk of chronic pain in the future.
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One of the critical components in pain management is the assessment of pain. Multidimensional measurement tools capture multiple aspects of a patient's pain experience but can be cumbersome to administer in busy clinical settings. ⋯ Our review identified eight multidimensional pain measurement tools that nurses can use in ambulatory or acute care settings to capture patients' experience of pain. The most important element in selecting a multidimensional pain measure, though, is that one tool is selected that best fits the practice and is used consistently over time.
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Surgical patients consider information about pain and pain management to be highly important (Apfelbaum, 2003). At the same time, evidence indicates that members of racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to experience inadequate pain management (Green, Anderson, Baker, Campbell, Decker, Fillingim, & Todd, 2003; Mossey, 2011). ⋯ Similar to English-fluent participants (Kastanias et al., 2009), participants who primarily spoke either Cantonese, Italian, or Portuguese at home placed moderate to high importance on all of the information items. and neither surgical subtype, health status nor age had any effect on the importance of any item. The multilingual sample in this study placed more importance than English-fluent participants on information regarding help with paying for pain medication (p = .001) and the side effects they were most likely to experience (p < .05). Due to a paucity of literature in this area, further research is warranted. Results may assist with evaluating and improving current approaches to surgical patient pain management education.
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Chronic pain is a complex integration of biological, psychological, and social variables. Multidisciplinary pain management experts design interventions that treat the multidimensional experience. Children and adolescents with sickle cell disease (SCD) are at risk for chronic pain. Increased risk is associated with multiple characteristics including sickle cell genotype, age, gender, frequency of hospitalization, duration of hospitalization, and certain comorbid diagnoses. Referral to pain management professionals for this population is often delayed. ⋯ Eighty-four percent of all eligible patients were screened during their routine sickle cell appointments resulting in a 110% increase in multidisciplinary pain management referrals. Future interventions and PDSA cycles are targeted at improving attendance at scheduled appointments, reducing hospitalizations, decreasing 30-day readmissions, and shortening length of stay.
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Pain is the most common symptom among inpatients, and patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) is one of the effective pain management methods for postoperative patients. ⋯ The present findings provide valuable information for the effective postoperative administration of intravenous PCA and may contribute to the development of customized patient-centered pain management intervention by nurses through more accurate predictions of analgesic consumption based on individual characteristics, the surgical site, and the type of surgery-especially organ donation surgery. This study could contribute to improving preventive interventions by general nurses as well as pain control nurses by enabling more accurate predictions of patients' pain and consumption of self-controlled analgesic agents based on personal characteristics and surgical characteristics.