Pain Management: An Inevitable Challenge for Healthcare Professionals - Essay Sample

Introduction

Pain can be described as an irritating feeling experienced by animals, which is brought by perceived or genuine hurt to the tissues of the body and can produce emotional or physical reactions (Williams & Craig, 2016). Pain can presumably be viewed as a protector since it safeguards our bodies from more harm by alerting our brains whenever a tissues a slight damage. In health practice, management of this sensation, pain, by nurses and other medical practitioners has raised a lot of critics and debatable issues. In medical terms, pain management can be defined as the process or procedure of providing professional curative care with the sole purpose of reducing or alleviating pain (Deshpande & Mailis, 2018). The number of individuals living with chronic pain has been rising with a considerably massive margin in the last decades (Alschuler, Kratz & Ehde, 2016). Despite many people having chronic pain illnesses, efforts to control and manage the pain have been in the spotlight as a result of the rising mortality amongst people living with incurable pain cancers and other diseases.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Debatable issues in pain management have brought about the following opposing statements concerning effective pain/ache management; 1. The policies from the Joint Commission (2018) support proper pain management from the nursing perspective (Drew et al., 2018). The plans from the joint commission (2018) hinder proper pain management from the nursing perspective.2. The nurse must take on the role of the healthcare team leader in order to help manage the patient's perception of his/her own pain experience. the nurse cannot take on the role of healthcare team leader since this is outside the realm of his/her scope of practice according to the ANA Nursing Scope and Standards for Practice document. 3. Safe houses are an effective and valid method for helping those with opioid addictions. Safe houses are one of the worst ways to help those with opioid addictions. 4. Providing access to clean syringes is one of the best methods for decreasing the spread of disease related to the opioid crisis. Providing access to clean needles only increases the adverse effects of the opioid crisis instead of reducing the impact of the crisis.

Issue 1. Policies From Joint Commission (2018)

Pain management policies developed in the 2018 Joint Commission support proper pain management from the nursing viewpoint. The commission's support for pain management from the perspective of a nurse is portrayed with its multi-level approaches and strategies to aid frontline staff, especially nurses, to deliver individualized and safe pain treatment (Drew et al., 2018). The commission is dedicated to offering any necessary support to health care staff such as nurses in their efforts to provide safe and quality pain diagnoses. From a nursing perspective, it is the responsibility of all health stakeholders-medical practitioners and all support services to ensure that patients receive the best care possible. In this sense, the Joint Commission policies support pain management by ensuring that all health institutions provide qualified support stuff and licensed medical workers as well as the required programs and resources to enhance pain management.

The commission's policy to include practicing medical professionals from academic and health care organizations, health technology, payer sectors as well as in professional bodies into the advisory panel may lead to significant improvements. Policies developed by the board of experts will have a substantial impact on the future of pain management and treatment. From a nursing viewpoint, the idea of including many medical experts from diverse sectors will have a significant improvement in proper manners of managing pain. The expertise possessed by practicing medical experts in the academic industry can be applied in coming up with new strategies to effectively control and manage chronic pain. Researchers can also develop new medication to chronic pain while those practicing in the health care industry can adopt the latest pain management strategies and medicines developed by the researchers and both expertise will be utilized. The plan to use combined effort and skill from medical practitioners in every sector can fasten the efforts of developing better and modern strategies of pain management.

The 2018 Joint Commission does not support pain management from the viewpoint of a nurse. First, the commission does not recognize the importance of the nurse-patient relationship during the recovery process (Drew et al., 2018). Nurses are, among all health care workers, with the most regular and extensive contacts with any patient and therefore have a vast contribution to patient's recovery. The Joint Commission provided only general approaches to pain management. These strategies lack a clear description of the activities for the various stakeholders involved. From a nursing viewpoint, the commission should have developed procedures that had individual tasks and responsibilities defined to a different group of stakeholders such as nurses, medical doctors, psychiatrists among groups. The ambiguous task description in pain management policies from the 2018 Joint Commission demonstrates its little support for proper pain management.

The 2018 Joint Commissions policies hinder proper pain management from the nursing viewpoint. Its policies lacked appropriate and feasible strategies to control the use of therapeutic opiates which the commission recommends for effective pain management. The policies did not define any plan to monitor and control the use of chronic pain-relieving drugs since they can result in further problems like addiction. Medications used in relieving chronic pain such as opiates are as well very addictive and poor control of their usage can create additional problems (Chang et al., 2018). Patients might end up being opiate addicts if the necessary measures for opiate use are not put in place.

Issue 2. Role of Healthcare Team Leader

The nurse must take on the role of the team leader in order to assist in the management of patients' perception of their own pain experience. Since nurses are the only health care staff with the majority of patient contacts, their roles in taking care of patients with chronic pain are essential. Nurses understand every patient's likes and dislike, reactions to both mild and chronic illness among other behavioral features. Nurses are also responsible for administering medical prescriptions to chronic patients and they therefore know and understand through experience how different patients react to varying medications. The role of nurses in the care for patients, especially chronic pain patients, is way too essential to be ignored and no system can operate well without nurses being part of the planning team (Boamah, 2018). Therefore, with their close relationship with the patients, nurses must assume the roles of team leaders in task forces responsible for managing patients' perception of their personal pain experience.

Nurses should be the health care team leaders since many nurses are caregivers as well as leaders in their homes and other social settings. The majority of nurses are either parents or have an individual to take care of. Nurses extend their caring work beyond the workplace and act as caregivers to their family members such as partners and children. It surely takes a resilient individual to give care to others on a daily basis but nurses do it. Their resilient work in ensuring the safety of patients should ensure that they take leadership positions in teams assigned to manage a patient's perception of their own pain experience (Boamah, 2018). With nurses as health care team leaders, it will be easier to manage a patient's understanding of personal pain experience.

The nurse cannot assume the role of a health care team leader since it is outside the realm of his/her scope of practice. According to the American Nurses Association Nursing Scope and Standards for Practice, it is not the responsibility of nurses to take on leadership roles in health care task groups and nurses. Nurses are responsible for many other tasks in the process of patient recovery and taking up a leadership role will only pile up to the existing workload (Kim et al., 2016). Assuming the role of a health care team leader will stretch a nurse to the maximum. A nurse's schedule is always busy and taking on more work in health care team leadership will be to the disadvantage of the patient. This is because the nurse will always be tired and will not provide quality care.

Nurses cannot take the role of team leaders in health care in order to manage patient pain experience since it is outside his/her job description. Instead, nurses should continue doing their curative work while the set policies ensure that every stakeholder is held countable in pain management and issues pertaining to the same. To enhance proper pain management approaches, nurses must stick to their designated work as everyone else and allow every staff to perform their duties. Nurses should also be relieved off pressure to raise their productivity and record a rising administrative assignment. Staying clear off team leadership positions and with minimal stress to increase productivity, nurses can effectively perform their pain management duties since the distraction is low (Kim et al., 2016).

Issue 3. Safe Houses and Opioid Addictions

Safe houses are an effective and valid method for helping those with opioid addictions since the population of individuals living with opiate dependencies is on the rise. The advantage of providing safe houses to help people with opioid addictions is that these structures will be cleaned, properly maintained as well as ensuring fast and reliable medical help to overdosing addicts (Holt, Katirai & Katirai, 2019). Safe houses will raise the standards of living of the addicts because several of them are used to living in a dump and incomplete structures. Addicts are also used to living in the streets while others reside in bad neighborhoods and the idea of safe houses is a vast improvement.

Safe houses are a solid strategy to help opioid addicts because apart from raising the living standards of addicts, they also save their lives. The number of overdose deaths has been on the rise for the past couple of decades and having a safe place where addicts can get high can really save lives. Safe houses for opioid addicts can provide fulltime monitoring of addicts and provide medical assistance in case of overdose. Immediate medical aid to overdose patients increases their chances of living and safe houses can be a considerable remedy to overdose deaths. Since people shoot up drugs in many risky places such as bathroom stalls and alleys and end up dying, safe houses will provide a safer environment for getting high and many lives can be saved. The problem of addiction will not be solved any time soon and providing a safer place to get high is a first step in the right direction.

Safe houses are one of the worst approaches for helping people with opioid addictions because of a number of reasons. First, as much as I want to believe that there still exist good persons in the world, I do not expect many people to back the idea of safe houses. There's no sane person who is willing to donate either money or time to babysit drug addicts. People are not willing to sacrifice their daily resources like finances and time to watch and monitor useless individuals like addicts (Holt, Katirai & Katirai, 2019). Second, the total costs of developing safe house building and their maintenance are incredibly high. Bills such as mortgage, electricity, water, property tax, gas and heat should need to be covered as wel...