Quality of care in postoperative pain management: what is realistic in clinical practice?

This paper presents a study describing nurses' assessment of whether it was realistic to carry out good quality of care in postoperative pain management. Further, the study compared their assessment with the quality of care actually performed in clinical practice as assessed by both patients and nurses. Three questionnaires were used; one for patients (n = 198) and two for nurses (n = 63). Nurses and patients responded to similar questions; the patients assessed the quality of care they had received, and the nurses assessed the quality of care they had delivered. The nurses also responded to questions concerning whether the different aspects of good quality of care were realistic to carry out in practice. The results show that in several important aspects of postoperative pain management, both patients and nurses assessed the quality of care to be lower than the nurses' assessment of what was actually possible to effectuate in clinical practice, e.g. pain assessment and information. This finding highlights the problem of applying evidence-based care in actual clinical practice.