Using of Non-Pharmacological Pain Methods, and The Perceived Barriers, Among Nurses in Critical Care Unit in Palestine ريسالة ماجستير

Abstract

Background: Despite significant progress in critical illness pain evaluation and analgesia, pain in critical illness remains an unsolved topic (Gélinas et al., 2016; Glowacki et al., 2015). Pain is alleviated in one of the two common approaches, pharmacological or non-pharmacological intervention. Using non-pharmacological methods such as relaxation techniques, meditation, listening to relaxing sounds or music or Quran and other complementary modalities, may have beneficial effect on patients’ level of pain by reducing it and decreasing the chance of pharmacological methods side effects. Aim: The aims of this study are to assess ICU Palestinian nurses use of non-pharmacological pain management modality to decrease ICU patients’ pain, and to examine the barriers to implement this modality. Method: A quantitative cross-sectional design was used. This study had three instrument packages (Appendix A). The first part demographic data, including the age, sex, health care sector and others. The second section is a tool that used 4-point Likert scale to examine ICU nursing use of non-pharmacological pain methods and it consisted of 16 items. The third section is six items of perceived barriers to use non- XII pharmacological pain methods. A convenient sample of 215 ICU nurses were included in the analysis of this study. Results: More than two-thirds of the nurses hold a bachelor’s degree. In addition, more than half of the nurses have 1-5 years of professional experience in nursing. Most of education sources on non-pharmacological pain management were from books and colleagues with 37.7% and 32.6% respectively. More than two-thirds of the nurses used non-Pharmacological Pain Methods in ICU. 60% of the nurses have high level, 10.2% have very high level. On the other hand, 27.4% are moderate and 2.3% are low. In terms of perceived barriers, the two highest barriers were the lack of time, workload and patient instability with 83.7% (n = 180), and 77.2% (n = 166), respectively. Conclusion: This study is the first of its kind in Palestine that assessed using nonpharmacological pain management and addressed the barriers among ICU nurses. The results revealed that more than two-thirds of nurses were using the non-Pharmacological Pain Methods in ICU. Implication and recommendation: Other future studies with different designs, such as observational and interventional studies, are needed to dig deep in this issue. We strongly recommend involving ICU patients in future studies to examine the efficacy of different nonpharmacological pain methods on their level of pain.