Population Specific Pain Assessment & Management Protocol Essay

Population Specific Pain estimate & Management Protocol - Essay ExampleThese include poor sleep, loss of appetite, decreased functioning, elevated levels of imprint and anxiety and decreased quality of life (Twycross, 1994). The powerlessness and hopelessness expressed by patients experiencing moderate to severe pain is all too often reverberate by nurses who lack the appropriate knowledge and assessment skills to manage pain effectively (Clements and Cummings, 1991). Common barriers to effective pain management reported in the lit include knowledge deficits fear of addiction to opioid medication and, lack of consistency in the systematic assessment and documentation of pain and the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions. (McCaffery and Ferrell, 1997)Assessment is widely regarded in the literature as the cornerstone to effective pain management. Nurses sp stop over more time with patients than any other member of the health sustenance team and ar thus in an optimal position to perform pain assessment. Through the integration of fundamental physiological knowledge, information on the patients memorial and the comprehensive assessment of their pain, the nurse plays a major role in optimizing patient management.In our society, information gathering is look ated almost uniformly as a good thing. (It is the information age, after all.) Nowhere is this truer than in medicine. For doctors, more information is always better. In the past, most of our information came from the patient. Now it increasingly comes from machines. Doctors like canvasss because we take in them as objective and more reliable than our own subjective judgments. We also see tests as something tangible we can offer the patient at the end of a clinic visit. Patients like tests for the same reasons. Ordering a test validates their concerns and promises concrete information-a definitive diagnosis. Sometimes patients even perceive their care as substandard if they are not given some sort o f test. While doctors and patients recognize that treatments may have side effects or lead to complications, both tend to view test as something that can whole help. The prevailing attitude seems to be it cant hurt just to gather a little information.Cancer, however, is a diagnosis do by examining human tissue under the microscope. And the only way to look at tissue under the microscope is to do a biopsy cut a junior-grade piece of tissue and remove it from the body. A biopsy is a small operation, and like any operation, it can be disruptive and painful and can lead to complications. So its not the kind of test you want to perform on everyone. The job of the cancer-screening test is to determine which patients should be biopsied. In other words, a screening test is a preliminary test. It is not a test to determine who has cancer instead, it is a test to determine who should be tested further.Can a contradict screening test be wrong The answer is almost certainly yes, although i t is very hard to prove. That is because we do not biopsy people with negative screening tests. The only way we ever come to suspect that a negative screening test might have been wrong is when a new cancer becomes clinically obvious soon after a person has a negative test.Testing In The Real WorldIn the real world, cancer testing is more complex. Test results arent just positive or negative often