Carmen Uscatu: Understanding and managing pain is highly intricate
Carmen Uscatu, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Understanding and managing pain is highly intricate, leading to the development of a dedicated medical specialty known as pain management.
I met Saskia Boerboom last week, when I visited Princess Maxima Center for Pediatric Oncology. She is an anesthesiologist and the Head of the Department of Anesthesia, Sedation, and Pain. I found out something very interesting: pain management is not only about drugs. Studies show that it is also about healthcare caregivers’ attitudes—the words they use and the way they behave in front of patients.
I asked her, ‘Maybe together we can organize training for the nurses at Marie Curie Children’s Hospital to help give their patients, the children, more joy? To reduce their pain and make them feel better.’ She gave me an example: children feel less pain and need less medication if they can control their pain. This struck me. I understood why, when I had surgery in France, I felt no pain despite it being invasive. The control of pain was in my hands through a pump that I used to administer the pain analgesic myself.
I started to read about what I discovered and found many research papers on this topic dating back to the 1960s. At Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, researchers in anesthesiology from Harvard Medical School conducted a study testing the effects of special care intervention (a pre-operative visit from the anesthesiologist) on patients’ post-operative pain.
They found that patients who received the special care visit from the anesthesiologist prior to surgery had a 50% lower requirement for opiate pain medication (e.g., morphine) following surgery. Interestingly, patients who were randomly assigned to special care also had a statistically significant decrease in their length of stay in the hospital following surgery.
A 2015 study found similar results with surgical nurses trained in compassionate care, highlighting the significant impact of pre-operative compassion on post-operative recovery.
We, Dăruiește Viață, have to implement this in our hospital. In fact, it benefits the children, their families, and even our nurses and doctors. Exercising compassion has been proven to be an antidote for burnout among healthcare providers.”
Source: Carmen Uscatu/LinkedIn