Improving Pain Management in the Intensive Care Unit by Assessment.

Purpose: Patients in the intensive care unit suffer from pain caused by life-threatening illness or injury but also treatments such as surgery and nursing procedures such as venipuncture. Unconsciousness following head trauma or sedation stage complicates self-report, and both under- and over-management of pain can occur. Inadequate assessment and treatment might follow from unsuitable pain assessment practices. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of the implementation of a pain assessment tool on nurses` documentation of pain and the administration of analgesia and sedation.

Design: Quantitative pre-post design.

Methods: The study was conducted at one intensive care unit at a university hospital and involved 60 patient records and 30 pre-implementations and 30 post-implementations of the Critical-Care Pain Observation Tool (CPOT).

Results: After implementation, a 38% adherence rate was found. The frequency of nurses' pain evaluations increased significantly from 1.3 to 2.3 per nursing shift. The implementation of CPOT also improved how often nurses identified pain by use of facial expressions, muscle tension, and cooperation with the mechanical ventilator, whereas focus on vital signs dropped (p = .014). A larger proportion of patients (17%) received paracetamol after the CPOT implementation compared with before (8%). Findings were statistically significant at p < .01.

Conclusions: Implementation of CPOT increased the frequency of pain evaluations, and the observable patient behavior was more often interpreted as pain-related. Nurses' adherence rate to sustained patient behavior focus being modest highlights the essential need for ongoing improvements in practice. Implementation of a new tool must be followed by non-pharmacological and pharmacological pain management steps.

Clinical implications: Implementing the CPOT as a pain assessment tool has the potential to enhance assessment practices. However, it is important to note that simply increasing assessment frequency does not guarantee nursing interventions to alleviate pain. This indicates the need for additional steps to be taken in order for nurses to complete the pain assessment cycle and effectively address interventions and reassessments.