Pain Management During Palliative Care

With life comes death. It is a well-known biological fact that the human body, no matter the individual or the amount of time, will one day begin to wear out and shut down its physiological processes. When that time comes, one hopes that the dying process is quick and painless. It is hard to know whether one’s death will be quick, but with the use of pain management and palliative care, one can rest assured that a painless death is achievable. Leming and Dickinson (2016) highlight palliative care, or controlling pain, as “care [that] seeks to satisfy the needs of patients and their families in several domains including the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual” (p 213). For patients, patients’ families, and healthcare professionals

The idea of palliative care is to relieve pain, so one might be led to believe that there are only positive aspects of it, but what happens when a patient does not get the proper pain management? How does this affect the patient and the patient’s family? Additionally, pain management during palliative care can impact the role of the nurse in ways such as providing proper assessments and healthcare. Of course there are beneficial outcomes to pain management during palliative care, but there are negative aspects and questions that must be answered as well. The following will discuss in totality how pain management during palliative care can impact the patient, the patient’s family, and healthcare professionals such as the

Pain management during palliative care can impact patients, patients’ families, and healthcare professionals such as nurses. Through pain management, patients are enabled to progress through the dying process in a pain-free manner, and yet sometimes experience adverse symptoms associated with some pain control measures, such as the use of opioid analgesics. Additionally, family members can sometimes experience the difficulties of watching their loved one suffer through pain and can positively benefit from the use of pain management when their loved ones are made more comfortable and enabled to die painlessly. Lastly, healthcare professionals, such as nurses, are impacted by pain management during palliative care in ways that require accurate assessment skills and comprehensive pain relieving strategies. This is by no means an extensive list of how pain management during palliative care can impact the individuals involved throughout the dying process, but it certainly highlights the importance of pain management and the role it plays in