Assessment of Pain in Post Surgical Patients - Essay Example

The research paper “Assessment of Pain in Post Surgical Patients” focuses on a subjective and objective assessment of pain in post-surgical patients of cardiothoracic surgery. Pain management includes the various types of pain experiences throughout an individual’s life cycle and alleviating the same through interventional measures. Pain experiences may include acute and chronic in nature. Pain has physiological, spiritual, emotional and psychosocial dimensions, it is for this reason managing pain through multidimensional observations, and assessments are extremely important.

Due to the various advances in the field of pain management (including assessment tools, newer guidelines on pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions), nurses may land up into incomplete or inadequate domain knowledge leading to ineffective pain management. These include the failure to identify types of pain (neuropathic or nociceptive or psychopathic?), how it will be assessed objectively and subjectively? If the type of pain is screened properly, it will create a roadmap to treat the pain in a patient whether with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (for nociceptive pain) or drugs that reduce neuropathic or psychopathic pain like Pregabalin or Sertraline respectively.

With these observations it will help to design a proper care because if the patient is suffering from neuropathic pain NSAIDs will be ineffective and if the patient has a more nociceptive component , then neuropathic drugs like Pregabalin will not mediate cure. Materials and Methodology A total of 75 patients will be evaluated as per the current admission beds in the CTVS ward. Both male and female patients would be evaluated. Inclusion Criteria Patients undergone CTVS surgery in past 7 days Patients expressing some sort of pain.

Exclusion criteria Patients without pain. Patients with chronic diabetes mellitus Patients having pain from fall, arthritis, fibromyalgia, spondylosis, disc prollapse, chronic low back pain prior to CTVS surgery. The reason for the exclusion criteria is that we wanted to find whether the sole component of CTVS surgery causes post operative pain in patients. The variables were due to the fact that diabetes, fibromyalgia, chronic low back pain, disc prollapse can all have a neuropathic component of pain and will interfere with our findings whether CTVS surgery is the cause of neuropathic pain.

The assessment tool that will be used is based on Dr Freynhagen’s Pain Detect Tool which comprises of a set of questions that gives each component of observation a individual score.( Freynhagen et al, 2009). The scores are assigned a weighted point of +1, -1,0, or +2. For example, if a patient complains of a pain that is radiating to both his hands from the point of origin ( heart in this case), a +2 is assigned in that criterion score. The final score of all the criteria are summated and put on an assessment scale to determine the objective component of pain as given below in the format below: Results evaluation The summated pain score is placed in a pain scale given in the attached appendix (A) from a 0 to 38 point scale.

If the score of the patient is 0-12 a neuropathic component is unlikely and it can be inferred the patient has chiefly nociceptive pain component, if the total score is 13 to 19 then the pain has both nociceptive and neuropathic compo