Pain Management in the Emergency Department

Question: Explain the process of managing patient deterioration or patients with pain in the ED. Answer: As a registered nurse, the management and the provision of the care and safety to the patient in every situation is the foremost duty of my profession. During the practice, a nurse has to face several cases where patients are suffering from various ailments. There was one case during my nursing practice involving a lady who was a 70-year-old suffering from intense abdominal pain and was immediately admitted to the emergency department. The management of the elderly patients is sometimes very difficult due to certain barriers faced during the assessment and the treatment and this case also included the same problem. As pain is the subjective experience and there is no objective means or tests to measure the quality and intensity of the pain. Hence, an effective communication is very important for the management of the acute and chronic pain in the patient (Herr, Coyne, McCaffery, Manworren, Merkel, 2011). However, as the patient in this case was elder and was also positive for dement ia, there was a barrier in the communication, which hindered the assessment of the pain in detail. At that time there was the requirement of the patience and interpersonal skills to encourage the patient to discuss her pain in detail. Moreover, with the help of the training that I had received during my nursing practice, I also kept on observing the behavioral expressions of the patient in determining the intensity of the pain. With the knowledge of the past medical history of the patient and under assistance of the physician, the low dose of the analgesic trial was given to the patient according to the available information regarding the pain for its management(Czarnecki et al., 2011). References Czarnecki, M., Turner, H., Collins, P., Doellman, D., Wrona, S., Reynolds, J. (2011). Procedural Pain Management: A Position Statement with Clinical Practice Recommendations.Pain Management Nursing,12(2), 95-111. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pmn.2011.02.003 Herr, K., Coyne, P., McCaffery, M., Manworren, R., Merkel, S. (2011). Pain Assessment in the Patient Unable to Self-Report: Position Statement with Clinical Practice Recommendations.Pain Management Nursing,12(4), 230-250. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pmn.2011.10.002