Pain Education and Conduction of Local Guidelines Improved the Attention to Pain (Utvikling I Sykepleien * Nursing Development‪)‬

ABSTRACT Successful cancer-pain management is based on attention to discover and evaluate pain. There is evidence that pain is poorly assessed and documented by clinicians. To overcome this problem, major efforts have focused on pain education. However, it has been shown that isolated education had a minimal impact on changing practice. In this study the whole staff on an oncology outpatients ward was educated at the same time in pain management. Local guidelines with instructions on how to care for patients with pain was created. The results from this study showed that after education the staff significantly asked more patients suffering from pain about pain. A tendency to better documentation about pain was found after the education. These results indicate that education to the whole staff at the same time and local guidelines are a favourable way to get a higher attention to patients with pain.