Jungquist co-authors AJN’s March 2017 supplement on acute pain management
Published March 8, 2017 This content is archived.
Assistant professor Carla Jungquist was published this month as co-author of a supplement for the American Journal of Nursing.
The special supplement includes three articles on the current state of acute pain management, including incidences, physiology and pathophysiology, multimodal pain treatments, and recommendations.
The authors stress the important role nurses play in delivering quality, safe acute pain care, acknowledging the potential of acute pain transitioning to chronic pain if insufficiently managed.
The supplement’s first article is a call to action for nurses to use evidence-based guidelines, expert consensus reports and position statements from professional nursing organizations to prevent that transition to chronic pain. They emphasize the impact and undertreatment of acute pain on patients, especially as a result of surgery or other trauma, and encourage nurses to collaborate with other health care team members to create and administer care plans that effectively treat acute pain to prevent progression to chronic pain.
The supplement’s second article includes current recommendations from evidence-based guidelines and expert consensus reports. The authors review multimodal analgesia interventions and explain preventative multimodal analgesia, systemic multimodal analgesics, and neuraxial and peripheral regional anesthesia. They also provide several evidence-based practice guidelines and expert consensus.
What is multimodal analgesia?
This individualized approach combines analgesics (drugs that reduce pain) from two or more drug classes or analgesic techniques with different mechanisms of action to target different pain pathways, maximizing pain relief with lower doses.
The third article in the supplement describes the important role nurses play in keeping patients safe from adverse events when opioids are administered. The authors emphasize that in order to make sound clinical decisions, nurses must be knowledgeable of risk factors that put patients at risk for adverse effects of IV and epidural opioids, and they must know how to assess patients for these risks. The authors advocate for a patient-centered approach for safe and effective pain management.
Please see the references below to access this valuable resource.
References
Polomano, R. C., & Jungquist, C. R. (2017). Forward [supplement]. American Journal of Nursing, 117(3), S3. doi: 10.1097/01.NAJ.0000513525.26192.18
Jungquist, C. R., Vallerand, A. H., Sicoutris, C., Kwon, K., & Polomano, R. C. (2017). Acute pain: A call for action [supplement]. American Journal of Nursing, 117(3), S4-S11. doi: 10.1097/01.NAJ.0000513526.33816.0e
Polomano, R. C. , Fillman, M., Giordano, N. A., Vallerand, A. H., Wiltse Nicely, K. L., & Jungquist, C. R. (2017). Multimodal analgesia for acute postoperative and trauma-related pain. American Journal of Nursing, 117(3), S12-S26. doi: 10.1097/01.NAJ.0000513527.71934.73
Jungquist, C. R., Smith, K., Wiltse Nicely, K. L., & Polomano, R. C. (2017). Monitoring hospitalized adult patients for opioid-induced sedation and respiratory depression [supplement]. American Journal of Nursing, 117(3), S27-S35. doi: 10.1097/01.NAJ.0000513528.79557.33
