Knowledge, practice and associated factors of pain assessment in critically ill patients among nurses working at adult intensive care units of federally administered public hospitals in Addis abeba,Ethiopia.
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Date
2019-06
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Addis Abeba University
Abstract
Background:-Pain can be defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience
associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage. The
patients in intensive care units often suffer from undertreated and unrecognized pain. More
than 50% have significant pain during procedures or routine care. However, pain is not
assessed properly for critically ill adult patients, although they may suffer from quite severe
pain, mainly because they cannot verbally express their pain.
Objective: To assess knowledge, practice and associated factors of pain assessment in
critically ill patients among nurses working at adult intensive care units of federally
administered hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from April 5 – 25, 2019.
Methods: Institutional based cross-sectional study with a pre tested semi-structured
questionnaire was conducted among 111 participants. All nurses working in intensive care
units of federally administered public hospitals were included in the study. Bivariate and
multivariate logistic regressions was computed to identify associated factors of knowledge
and practice of pain assessment in critically ill adult patients and variables with a p-value <
0.05 were considered statistically significant.
Result: More than half (60.4%) of nurses had adequate knowledge about pain assessment in
critically ill adult patients. The proportion of nurses who had good pain assessment practice
for critically ill adult patients was 55.9%. Working experience of >5 years [OR= 0.194, CI=
(0.41, 0.910)], nursing workload [OR =7 .766, CI = (2.450, 24.617)], sedation interfering
with pain assessment [OR = 7.628, CI = (2.348, 24.778)] and knowledge of pain assessment
[OR = 5.219, CI= (1.673, 16.280)] were factors significantly associated with pain assessment
practice of nurses.
Conclusion and recommendation: The result of this study revealed adequate knowledge of
pain assessment with poor pain assessment practice. Nursing work load, knowledge, year of
working experience and sedation interfering with pain assessment were factors significantly
associated with pain assessment practice. Intensive care units should have adequate nurses to
minimize nursing workload and ongoing training should be provided. There should be
protocols and guidelines for pain assessment in ICUs.
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Keywords
Knowledge, Practice, Pain Assessment, Nurses, ICU, Associated factors