Assessing a patient’s pain experience efficiently and effectively is a very important aspect of the nursing practice. It enhances the nurse’s capacity to reduce the pain experience, enhance calmness, impact psychological and physical functions positively, and increased fulfillment of pain assessment (Wood, 2008). But, often measuring and assessing pain becomes a challenging sensation. As such, this paper elucidates the different barriers experienced by nurses during assessing pain and the strategies to employ in order to overcome these barriers and realize effective and efficient pain assessment.
Challenges and Barriers to Pain Assessment
As a nurse caring for the old people, I experience several barriers when it comes to assessing pain in patients. One of the barriers I encounter is the attitudes and beliefs of older people as well as those with dementia. Sometimes, they tend to be stoic and accommodating of their pain. These groups of people believe that the pain they experience is a by-product of their age. Therefore, they resist being viewed as weak, needy or a bother to us. As a result, they fail to self-report their pain accurately leading to under-assessing or over-assessing their pain.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Secondly, the lack of sufficient pain education is another barrier. During nursing training, we receive basic pain education thus rendering us to have inadequate as well as misconceptions about pain assessment. Additionally, after qualification, there still exist knowledge gaps. Therefore, this leads to a deficit in important skills hence rendering us unable to recognize vital signs and symptoms of pain. Moreover, though a patient’s pain self-reporting is considered the threshold of assessing pain, often I find myself distrusting the patient’s expression of their pain and instead work using my benchmark of acceptable pain.
Strategies to Overcome Barriers
One of the strategies to employ to realize effective pain assessment is electing standardized pain assessment guidelines (Subramanian et al., 2011) . I feel that the lack of irrefutable guidelines for pain assessment in the nursing practice has rendered it difficult to execute my obligations. It means if there are clear guidelines on pain assessment to guide the nursing practice, cases of pain misdiagnosis will reduce (Subramanian et al., 2011) . Naturally, every nurse understands what he or she is supposed to do, but it will be helpful to assess pain with guidelines put in place.
The other strategy involves pain assessment and management training (Subramanian et al., 2011) . I feel when training is made available our knowledge on pain management is retained thus making us more certain in caring for the patients (Wood, 2008). Therefore, as nurses, receiving some training in pain assessment will create more understanding and improve pain practice .
References
Subramanian, P., Allcock, N., James, V., & Lathlean, J. (2011). Challenges faced by nurses in managing pain in a critical care setting. Journal Of Clinical Nursing , 21 (9-10), 1254-1262.
Wood, S. (2008). Assessment of pain. Retrieved from https://www.nursingtimes.net/clinical-archive/pain-management/assessment-of-pain/1861174.article
