Inadequate pain assessment is one of the most difficult barriers to achieving good pain management. Insufficient education of pain from both nurses and patients, poor pain assessment tools, and patients’ fear of complications associated with analgesic drugs are some of the factors that contribute to inadequate pain assessment. Some of the barriers to effective pain management resulting from nurses’ lack of training and inexperience of pain evaluation are nurses’ inattentiveness to patient signs of pain, nurses’ differing interpretations of pain, and nurses’ delayed response to assess pain. Moreover, nurses’ deficiency of understanding patients’ attitudes, beliefs, and previous pain experience, nurses’ lack of knowledge in selecting appropriate …show more content…
For instance, both medical and surgical patients who recalled pain and other traumatic situations while in the ICU had a higher incidence of chronic pain (38%) and PTSD symptoms (27%), and a lower health-related quality of life (21%) (Barr, Fraser, Puntillo, et al. 2013). Inadequate pain assessment can cause longer ICU stays or hospital readmissions. Longer ICU stays are linked to the development of chronic pain. In fact, chronic pain becomes the disease, and impairs quality of life as significant comorbidities in post-ICU patients (Puntilo & Naidu 2016). Poor pain control can result in increased morbidity or mortality. Additionally, pain can also evoke stress response, suppress natural killer cell activity, increase circulating catecholamines, cause catabolic hypermetabolism, catabolic stimulation, and hypoxemia. Unrelieved pain reduces patient mobility, resulting in complications such as deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary, embolus, and pneumonia (Wells, Pasero, & McCaffery, 2008). These are all problems that can interfere with quality of life. One significant issue that was appointed out by Puntilo and Naidu (2016) was that “ICU patients receiving continuous infusions of opioids can become tolerant to, and dependent on, opioids and are at risk for ICU-acquired opioid withdrawal, especially if opioids are down-titrated too