Pain management nursing : official journal of the American Society of Pain Management Nurses
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The experience of musculoskeletal pain is widespread among adults and entails high costs to both individuals and society. Few studies look at disparities in pain management. ⋯ Nurses should be aware of the association of education and income with pain-medication use, which suggests that pain medication use is less accessible to those with fewer resources. Pain is a significant public-health problem, and access to medicine deserves attention from nurses, healthcare workers and policymakers.
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Pain management education is threaded through prelicensure nursing education. However, the perspectives of faculty teaching pain assessment and management within the context of the opioid crisis are not addressed in the literature. Pain assessment and management is a complex process requiring critical thinking and clinical reasoning. The current opioid crisis has brought new challenges to health care professionals who provide pain management, and this is a concern for nurses. ⋯ Participants' teaching practice was based on experiential learning rather than formal education and often was heavily influenced by a seminal event in their own nursing practice. The findings support the need to improve the education of undergraduate nursing students about pain management in the context of the current opioid crisis.
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Changes over time to self-managed chronic pain treatments are not a routine part of pain management discussions and might provide insight into adjustments that improve pain outcomes. ⋯ The ePMLHC has the potential to enhance communication about past pain management treatments and promote more personalized pain treatment regimens, but further development is required.
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A plethora of statistics and claims exist concerning the rise in prescription opioid use and the increase in opioid-related deaths. Eleven misperceptions were identified that underlie some of the growing national concern and backlash against opioid use. Misperceptions include the number of opioid overdose deaths, the quality of government-sponsored data and guidelines, the impact of opioid dose escalation on overdose risk, postoperative opioid use associated with long-term use, and the link between prescription opioid use and heroin initiation. Implications for research, practice and education include (a) a call for improvement in data recording, (b) unbiased and clear reporting of information, (c) a call for health care providers to ask critical questions when presented with data, and (d) a call for policymakers to avoid unnecessarily restrictive practices that are founded in fear and may cause unintended harm to patients in pain.
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Nurses who care for hospitalized patients are responsible for ensuring adequate pain management is provided in a safe manner. The clinical challenge is balancing the effective control of the patient's pain with the side effects of administering opioids. The aim of this literature review is to explore the evidence on how nurses assess for opioid-induced sedation and advancing respiratory depression and how they integrate those data in their critical thinking skills when deciding to administer opioids for pain. ⋯ This review revealed a lack of evidence between how nurses assess for opioid induced advancing sedation and excessive respiratory depression, and the impact, including the adverse events associate with acute pain management.