Barriers to pain management in long-term care

Barriers to pain management in long-term care

Introduction

The research article to be discussed in this paper aims to determine the barriers to pain management in long-term care. It is focused on the care-giver perspective and in this case nurses since they are the ones who are tasked with the responsibility of taking care of patients. This paper also focused on older patients who experience chronic pain. The purpose of this paper is to review the research article and all the steps that were taken in order to determine the validity of the most prominent barrier to pain management.

Research Question

The research question was, Identifying barriers to pain management in long-term care (Mary & Nicola, 2013). This research question was specific and precise which means that the purpose of the study was indicated in the study question. Furthermore, the research question eliminated all chances of ambiguity because the meaning was clear. Therefore, this research question was appropriate for this study as it was short, precise and it summarized the entire research. The event that could have affected this question is the need to come up with an effective pain-management strategy.

Research design

A quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive design was used (Mary et al., 2013). This research design was appropriate as the research question was purely observational in nature. However, one limitation of this research design is that it cannot determine cause and effect (Burke, 2001). Correlational research involves collecting data in order to determine whether, and to what degree, a relationship exists between variables. The author utilized this design over others because it is cost effective and it does not require a lot of time.

Sample size

The target population for the study was all nurses working with older people in LTC (Mary et al., 2013). The nurses were from two private and three public local long-term caregiving facilities. The sample size was adequate since it included nurses from both private and public facilities. Also, the nurses had different working conditions and educational backgrounds; this diversity ensured variety of research findings for effective comparison. The nurses who participated in the research were 83 out of the targeted 138. The number of participants was low considering the number of long-term caregiving facilities sampled. Five facilities should have yielded at least a three-quarter of the questionnaires issued. A bigger number of participants would have yielded to more diversified findings hence a more concrete conclusion.

Data collection

A self-report questionnaire was used as the sole research method (Mary et al., 2013). The questionnaire had multiple choices ranging from ‘never interferes’ to ‘always interferes’. Also, for numeric value, the questionnaire had a seven-point Likert scale. The ethical approval for the research was given by, the clinical research ethics committee of the Cork Teaching Hospitals.

Findings

The findings of the research indicated that patient-related barriers were more prevalent in pain evaluation (Mary et al., 2013). The findings answered the research question since it sought to find the barriers to pain management in long-term care.

Summary

Patient-related barriers are more prevalent compared to caregiver-related and patient-related barriers in pain evaluation. This is because of the difficulty in assessing pain in older patients who have problems with cognition. The evidence is strong enough to suggest a change in pain assessing methods. In summary, pain-assessing methods should be more of observation tools that help to detect the existence and existence of pain.

References

Egan, M., & Cornally, N. (2013). Identifying barriers to pain management in long-term care. Nursing Older People, 25(7).

Johnson, B. (2001). Toward a new classification of nonexperimental quantitative research. Educational Researcher, 30(2), 3-13.