Nurses' knowledge of pharmacological measures on acute pain management in Western Saudi Arabia

OBJECTIVE: To assess the nursing knowledge of acute pain management in a tertiary hospital.

METHODS: Three hundred closed-answer questionnaires were distributed in various hospital departments at King Khalid National Guard Hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 2007. Three main topics were tested in the questionnaire; nursing opinion on patient self-report of pain as a main indicator of pain intensity, the need to increase opioids dose when the first dose had been safe but ineffective, and nurses' attitude toward the incidence of addiction, tolerance, and physical dependence.

RESULTS: Of the respondents, 45.8% used the patient self-report of pain as an indicator of pain intensity in the smiling patient (A), and 55.1% relied on that in the grimacing patient (B). Fifty percent of respondents in patient A and 30.5% in patient B decided to give no more morphine to both patients despite their pain, while 7.6% and 19.5% of nurses selected the option of giving higher morphine dose to both patients. Only 38.1% of nurses chose the correct answer for risk of addiction (<1%) and 41.6% selected an exaggerated response range from 25-100% as a chance of addiction. Very few nurses recognized the problem of tolerance and physical dependence and picked the right answers.

CONCLUSION: Nurses' knowledge of acute pain management is deficient in many aspects. Proper education is needed to improve their knowledge of pain.