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Comparison of medical, surgical and oncology patients' descriptions of pain and nurses' documentation of pain assessments
Author(s) -
MSN L. Dawn Camp RN,
O'Sullivan Patricia S.
Publication year - 1987
Publication title -
journal of advanced nursing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.948
H-Index - 155
eISSN - 1365-2648
pISSN - 0309-2402
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2648.1987.tb03049.x
Subject(s) - documentation , medicine , pain assessment , medical record , medline , physical therapy , nursing documentation , pain management , nursing , nursing care , computer science , political science , law , programming language
Eighty‐four nurse‐patient dyads were studied to obtain descriptions of pain from medical, surgical and oncology patients experiencing pain. These descriptions were compared with the documentation of pain assessment recorded by the nurses providing care to these patients. Neither the descriptions of pain nor the amount of information documented about that pain differed significantly across the three groups. For each group, nurses documented significantly less than 50% of what the patients described. Inadequate documentation of pain assessment has legal and continuity of patient care implications.