Pain management aim is to reduce the cause of pain, provide analgesia, or both. Avoid feeling that because a resident cannot express or respond to pain that it does not exist. Manage pain by reducing or controlling the source. Provide analgesia as required and appropriate.
One of the more complex scenarios you’ll face as a nurse is patient pain management. The patients you find may experience pain in very different ways and to very different degrees. Patients also respond uniquely to pain management medications and techniques.
While it’s eventually up to the attending physician to prescribe and manage a patient’s pain, it falls within your role to strictly monitor your patients, act as a link between them and the doctors you work with and assure that levels are fair and well maintained.
Nursing Responsibilities For Assessing, Managing, and Estimating The Effectiveness of Pain Management Include The Following:
- Defining the nature of the pain and its impact on the resident.
- Need to recognize factors that affect the resident’s perception and expression of pain.
- Determining when to administer analgesics.
- Choosing which analgesic to administer if more than one is ordered.
- Determining the dose of the analgesic medicine to administer, if a range is prescribed.
- Assessing the effectiveness of the analgesic.
- Evaluating and managing the side effects of the medication.
- Defining why the analgesic was ineffective, if applicable.
- Determining the requirement to change the dose, timing, or medication and listing this information to the healthcare provider.
- Using nursing attacks to promote comfort and relieve pain.
- Making sure the plan of care represents pain assessment and management.
- Documenting pain assessment and invasion noted herein to reflect the use of the nursing process.
How Can Nurse Will Handle The Patients?
Nurses need to spend more time with patients than any other member of the healthcare team. They play a significant, active and essential part in controlling cancer patients’ pain and alleviating suffering. In managing cancer pain, the nurse needs to understand the psychological state of the cancer patient, cancer pain, cancer pain treatment, harmful effects of unrelieved cancer pain and patient’s socio-cultural background.
The nurse needs to understand that there are two varieties of pain, nociceptive and neuropathic pains and that 80% of the cancer patients in pain could have two or more than four different pains at the same time. Nurses’ role in controlling cancer pain include understanding the patient, identifying the root of the problem, assessing pain, planning the care, administering medication, evaluating effectiveness, ensuring good pain control and individualizing treatment.
It also includes nursing interruptions such as giving tender nursing care, preventing pain, advocating, educating, communicating, supporting, comforting and counseling the patient. The nurse must use both pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatments to individualize treatment, know all the drugs that are utilised for the treatment of Cancer Pain, how these drugs reduce pain, and what their side effects are. Moreover, the nurse must use the WHO guidelines to treat pain and must prefer the right drug, right dose, given at the correct times, with the right periods and to the right patient. Well, stem cell therapy in India will also be used to support pain management to relieve the pain.
Also, she must evaluate the effectiveness of treatment, give PRN doses for breakthrough pain and suggest for specific changes. The role of the nurse is to anticipate the patient’s pain requirements, advocate for the patient for what feels suitable for him within his cultural context and incorporate the patient’s belief.
The nurse can physically reduce pain by promoting comfort, painful support area, gentleness in managing the patient and use nursing treatments. The nurse can suggest physiotherapy, Acupuncture, spiritual support, Occupational therapy, social worker, psychologist, and psychiatrist to address different types of pain.
