Some of the elderly live with chronic pain due to a lack of communication with health care providers. When speaking with their practitioner they fail to emphasize those daily aches and leave with questions regarding pain management. I recent interviewed a resident about her pain and she denied any pain. Until her son said, “what about your hands?” She explained, it was chronic discomfort in her hands and she does not take medication for it. I explained no one has to live with pain and ask her permission to notify the doctor. She seemed appeared relieved and granted me authority to contact the physician on her behalf. There are patients that will not allow the nurse to contact their physician to request pain medication; some have indicated
The proper way to ensure that this is not a constant problem is to make sure that initial pain assessments as well as re-assessments are done in a timely manner. It seems as though the initial pain assessment was completed using the pain scale but the re-assessment was not complete and documented in the proper amount of time. In order to ensure proper documentation of the re-assessment once the first pain assessment has been completed and an intervention has properly been administered, the first action step will be to make sure that the reassessment is complete within one hour of pain intervention. With electronic mars it is easy to build in a recheck into the system to alert the nurse that a reassessment is needed once the pain medication has been administered to the patient. When a pain intervention is done, a flag will come up to remind the nurse taking care of the patient that a reassessment is due. This will also resolve the issue on the tracer audit of how does the nurse know the intervention worked. Another issue on the audit was if no pain intervention was done what was the reason for it not being done.
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) implies that acute pain, left untreated, can lead to chronic pain. Chronic pain affects more Americans than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined and leads the cause of long-term disability in America.
Establish a convenient time with patient to talk about pain and its psychological and emotional effects.
Chronic bodily pain occurs for a number of reasons, such as nerve damage from a vehicle accident, steroid-induced bone pain from cancer treatment, and many other health problems. This kind of pain is defined as discomfort that lasts more than 12 weeks. It often makes daily activities challenging and significantly less enjoyable, potentially resulting in sadness and depression because you never feel “right.”
Millions of people suffer with chronic pain; making it the top reason people go see the doctor. With a price tag of at least $635 billion a year, that’s more than cancer, heart disease and diabetes combined. While powerful painkillers help many folks cope, many people don’t want to have to rely on a bottle of pills for the rest of their life.
According to Trail-Mahan et al., (2016), there are several obstacles to successful pain management such as irresponsible behavior, imprecise, inadequate repeated assessments, and inadequate analgesics dispensation execution and inefficient communication between nurses and patients and mostly among nurses mostly at change of shift. Lack of education among healthcare workers about proper pain medication dosing and unjustified worry about controlled substance addiction lead to poor pain administration. Patients may not have any understanding of the pain scale or sometimes they are afraid to report pain. However, because of the lack of education, patients may ask for pain medication when the pain is very severe and the medication is not enough to take care of the pain. Also, sometimes their fear of dependency is greater than their fear of the pain they are in. As
You did a fantastic job with explaining the different types of pain. I giggled with the sentences “ So, if you want to lessen the effects of pain, improve your mood and remain positive.” Telling yourself to remain positive is not as easy as it sounds when you are dealing with ongoing pain. It is a very true statement but is not a easy answer to helping one lessen the pain they are feeling, wither it be short fast pain like bumping your elbow, to expected pain like labor, to chronic pain. When you are dealing with depression or another mental illness that is causing pain, remaining positive can be an extremely hard task to accomplish.
Many of Americans have been diagnosed with chronic pain. In fact according to the Institute of Medicine 116 million United States adults live with chronic pain. The majority of these adults do not seem to receive the adequate treatment needed to help them to cope or to treat their pain. This is primarily due to the physicians not being able to efficiently diagnose their patients, and or the physicians lack the knowledge of the best ways to help manage the pain their patients are experiencing. This is why most people believe that Physicians are the main cause for the rise of prescription drug abuse (Garcia, 2013).
A holistic approach to managing pain and discomfort is important because pain has an impact on not just the individuals physically but in many other ways such as: mental Cultural, Social, Emotional, Religious and spiritual needs
There is perhaps no greater joy in life then overcoming an illness you are born with as a child; to finally be able to stop having weekly doctor’s visits and be able to live life like the “normal kids”. But on rare occasion, it becomes a Pyrrhic victory. Having undergone a bone marrow stem cell transplant during which my heart stopped due to a serve allergic reaction, I developed chronic pain from side effects of the transplant. At first, a steady course of Vicodin and morphine made it bearable, but scans showed the devastation it caused to organs in my body such as the liver and kidneys. My doctors gave me the following options: Stop taking the medication and deal with the constant pain or continue with the medication and avoid the pain.
The third principle of patient-clinician communication that I feel strong about is continuous learning. Nurses job is not only to administer medication and treatments, part of our job is to educate our patients. Making sure that they understand their medical condition and the potential impact on their lives. Not all patients learn the same way or at the same pace. Some patient may have visual, hearing, cognitive, or learning impairment. Knowing our patients and approaching them the right way is very important. Since I work in Surgical Intensive Care (ICU) most of our patients had some kind of surgery, and even though it is very unlikely that they will be discharged home from ICU, learning process starts there. Teaching them about their medical
When the human body receives an injury or infection, there is a crucial period in which the body heals itself. During this period of rehabilitation, the body is desperately trying to return to its original state. This is called acute pain, or pain that is directly related to tissue damage (paper cut, broken arm, and so on). If something disrupts this process, the injury can later manifest itself as chronic pain. *IChronic pain is defined as “pain that lasts longer than 3 months.” Chronic pain can also be caused by nerve damage, spinal conditions, surgeries, and so on.*D Symptoms of chronic pain often include:
Chronic pain can be mental, emotionally and physically debilitating. Chronic pain affects us on many different levels. Your brain senses pain from sensory, emotional and cognitive angles. The brain is wired to expect severe pain, and it swiftly initiates a strong pain response. Neuropathways rely on past experiences that help the brain deal with similar threats. Our cognitive and emotional responses can jumble our actual pain signals. Similar physiological treatments are prescribed for an emotional response and actual pain.
Many patients are reluctant to share their pain with the nurse, they don’t want to bother the staff, or
This paper is going to talk about how to deal with chronic pain. First of all, this paper will explain what chronic pain means by providing the foremost chronic pain encountered in life such as low back, joints, or other kinds. Next, this paper will cover why it is important to address conditions related to chronic pain, and will explore methods and strategies showing how to cope with continuing pain. Finally, this paper will share some predictable outcomes and a conclusion.