Nurses' perspectives of pain assessment and management in dementia care in hospital.

OBJECTIVE

To explore nurses' perspectives and generate recommendations for nursing practice of pain assessment and management in dementia care in a hospital setting.

METHODS

Semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with nurses who had experience in dementia care from two care units of a regional hospital. Data were analysed using six phases of reflexive thematic analysis.

RESULTS

Eight nurses from two inpatient units of a local district hospital were interviewed. Five themes were identified: (1) ways of understanding, (2) practicality of pain assessment tools, (3) usefulness of pain scores, (4) analgesia use and (5) limitations to practice. Nurses perceived pain tools did not sufficiently help to assess pain in people with dementia, and adaptation was often needed when scoring pain. Overuse of analgesia, trial-and-error practice and delayed prescriptions for analgesia limited pain management effectiveness for people with dementia during hospitalisation.

CONCLUSIONS

Pain tools are preferably used as a complementary method in addition to nurses' intuitional judgement. Reporting pain via scores requires a more complete narrative description from the source of pain reports to allow clinicians to accurately report a persons' pain. Clinicians must minimise trial-and-error practice in analgesia by conducting comprehensive pain assessments. Health-care organisations need to foster timely collaboration between clinicians to support nurses' practice limitations for effective analgesia administration in dementia care.