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Pain management in home hospice patients: A retrospective descriptive study
Author(s) -
Campbell Cathy L.,
Kelly Meghan,
Rovnyak Virginia
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
nursing and health sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.563
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1442-2018
pISSN - 1441-0745
DOI - 10.1111/nhs.12359
Subject(s) - medicine , pain management , modalities , cancer pain , retrospective cohort study , palliative care , proxy (statistics) , descriptive statistics , physical therapy , descriptive research , family caregivers , medline , cancer , nursing , social science , statistics , mathematics , machine learning , sociology , computer science , political science , law
The development and evaluation of evidence‐based, safe, and effective home‐based pain management models for caregivers implementation is receiving greater attention in the literature because of international initiatives intended to increase the number of people who receive end‐of‐life care in home‐based settings. The purpose of this “retrospective descriptive design” study was to describe pharmacological pain management and outcomes for 40 cancer and non‐cancer patients receiving hospice care at home. While the median pain score was higher at admission in the cancer group than in the hospice care at home group, the difference was not significant at or within 48 hour of admission. Overall, there was a significant decrease in pain from the first measurement to the second. Within the last seven days of life, the majority of participants were not able to provide a pain severity score when asked to evaluate the effectiveness of pain management, thus their caregiver provided a proxy evaluation. Pain management was effective in the home setting. More research is needed on the best methods to teach lay caregivers to assess pain and evaluate the effectiveness of pharmacological modalities to manage pain.