Changing acute pain management to improve patient outcomes: An educationalapproach

The United States Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) Acute Pain Management Guidelines were written to provide a scientific basis for p ractice. Educational programs designed to promote use of the guidelines may change practice in community hospitals. This article describes the develop ment and implementation of an education program for nurses, physicians, and pharmacists in sbr community hospitals. Program content addressing the use of continuous quality improvement (CQI) teams, detailed pain histories, ap plication of algorithms and dose calculation is described; direct and indir ect outcome means res are reviewed. Six months after the program, all three experimental sites reported use of the AHCPR Guidelines in practice. Nurse s reported that assessment and documentation of patients' duration of pain were perceived to be the most important caregiver behaviors providing benef it to patients: Across all respondents' reports of regularly performed acti vities, the activity performed by the largest proportion was assessing and documenting pain using a 0-10 rating scale. (C) U.S. Cancer Pain Relief Com mittee, 1999.