Using Nurse-Led Pain Management Seminar as Intervention to Reduce Pain in Orthopedic Patients

Orthopedic-related pain is a symptom that many patients experience and is often what causes a patient to seek medical care. Pain can be subjective and personal in nature, which can make it hard for a patient to describe the amount of pain they feel to the outside observer. Nurses have a responsibility to help relieve the suffering of their patients and to cause no harm. However, there has been evidence of biases and stigma interfering with a nurse’s judgment in managing a patient’s pain. With the rise of the opioid crisis, it has been hard for nurses to manage pain with patients who have a history of opioid addiction. The purpose of this project is to increase the knowledge of nurses on how to manage pain with orthopedic patients. Pain management is more than just medication, nurses need to consider and offer non-pharmacological options too. There is a lack of knowledge among nurses about non-pharmacological options and managing pain for difficult patients. Research has shown that education and encouraging nurse-led seminars about pain management can make nurses more confident in their role in pain management and act with interventions. Nurse interventions in patients’ pain have led to effective management of patients’ pain. Therefore, the method of this project is to establish a nurse-led seminar to teach nurses what pain is, how to manage it in patients and how to treat orthopedic pain with both pharmacological and non-pharmacological methods. There will be two ways to test the effectiveness of the seminar. A pre and post-test will be provided before and after the training to determine if nurses learned from the training to analyze the effectiveness of this training. Also a patient survey on their pain management will be conducted before and after the nurse seminar