What Is Pain Management Essay

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Pain management is recognized as an essential aspect of patient care by The Joint Commission and the World Health Organization along with other national professional organizations and health agencies.
The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) has the best known and accepted pain definition: Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional/affective and cognitive experience that is associated with actual or potential tissue damage or is described in terms of such damage [1]. Pain is always a personal, subjective, unique [2], and multidimensional experience and is affected by the patient’s gender [3], age, culture, previous pain experiences, and emotional factors, such as joy, grief, fear, excitement, and the patient’s beliefs and …show more content…

When patients are admitted to the hospital, shift assessments are completed by the nurse. These assessments include a patient’s complaint of pain. The patient is asked to rate their pain on a scale of 0-10 (0 = no pain and 10 = extreme pain). If the patient has a pain scale of 3-5, the nurse is to offer a PRN PO medication and then follow up within an hour to reassess the patient’s perception of the pain. If the patient has a pain scale of 6-10, the nurse is to offer IV PRN pain medications, and again to reassess pain within the hour (pain reassessments often get missed). Nurses then administer the medication as ordered, record the time administered and write the next time due on the dry erase board in the patient’s room. A standard IV PRN order for patients admitted to the hospital is Morphine 2-4 mg IVP q 4hrs. PRN pain, or Dilaudid 0.5-1 mg IVP q 4hrs PRN pain. The standard practice is to start with the lowest dose which may be repeated in 30 minutes if the patient continues to have a pain scale of 6-10. If the max. dose is reached, nurses are to report this to the doctor. The doctor will either increase the dose or increase the frequency, occasionally they will do both. With …show more content…

Use of the PCA pump is commonly seen in post-operative patients and patients in later stages of cancer. Patients have been found to prefer PCA because it allows them to self-administer their analgesia (Chumbley 2010). However, there are not very many articles written about patients admitted with abdominal pain, cellulitis or chronic pain issues such as chronic back pain, which seems to be of the most common complaints from inpatients. In the article, Efficacy of Patient-controlled Analgesia for Patients with Acute Abdominal Pain in the Emergency Department: A Randomized Trial, assesses the efficacy of PCAs for patients with acute abdominal pain verses patients dosed by a physician and then administered per the nurse. The study does not find any significant difference in pain relief or patient satisfaction, however it does state that the study does provide support for the use in the Emergency Department and there are need for further

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