Improving pain management in cancer and palliative care patients: Two patient educational interventions used in RCTs.

Grey Literature Database

Home
Evidence
Evidence Collections
Grey Literature
Improving pain management in cancer and palliative care patients: Two patient educational interventions used in RCTs.

Authors

David Stephenson¹,
Brian Simmons¹,
Debra Rowett²,
Miranda Gibb¹,
Paddy Phillips¹,
Frank May¹,
Amy P Abernethy³,
Patsy Yates⁴,
Sanchia Aranda⁵,
Helen Edwards⁴,
Robyn Nash⁴,
Helen Skerman⁴

Organisations

Flinders University of South Australia¹,
Repatriation General Hospital, Adelaide²,
Duke University Medical Center³,
Queensland University of Technology (QUT)⁴,
University of Melbourne⁵

Year

2004

Excerpt

One-to-one patient educational interventions are increasingly seen as an important and effective means of achieving sustained changes in behaviour, attitudes and care outcomes. Such Interventions may have a significant role in achieving improvements in the understanding and management of pain within cancer and palliative care populations. This session aims to compare two different patient education interventions used in two Australian RCTs. The Palliative Care Trial (pC1) utilises an educational intervention called Structured Educational Visiting (SEV) which represents an adaptation of traditional academic detailing to health professionals and an incorporation of the principles of social marketing. The SEV is designed as a means of delivering evidenced-based patient education to overcome barriers to the use of strong analgesia, empower patients and their carers and improve their understanding and management of pain, as well ad the primary side-effects of opioid therapy. Within the PCT design, two structured educational visits, each lasting approximately 30-40 minutes are provided to patients and their carers. The Pain Management Intervention (PMI) trialled in the second study aimed to increase patients' ability to communicate with health professionals about pain management, and to decrease patients' reluctance to take analgesia. The intervention used instructional and cognitive behavioural strategies and included general information giving about pain and pain management, coaching to assist patients to learn more adaptive ways to communicate pain, and the development of a personalised pain management plan, which included strategies to address patient-specific barriers to effective pain management. The intervention was administered over two sessions. The first session, approximately 30 minutes in length, was administered in the outpatient department and the second, approximately 15 minutes, was administered by telephone one week later. The session provides a valuable opportunity for these two approaches to be compared and contrasted and provides a forum for issues such as sustainability, reproducibility, and further research in this innovative area of research to be explored.