Nurse-initiated analgesia improves patients' pain experience: time for change?

摘要

Pain is a very common problem in EDs. There is convincing evidence that treatment of pain in the ED is suboptimal, in timeliness and adequacy of pain control.1 Contributors to this failure include myths regarding masking of symptoms, historical models of care where analgesia can only be initiated by a doctor, staff attitudes and systems issues such as ED crowding. There is a growing body of evidence that nurse-initiated opiate analgesia results in reduced delays to analgesia and is safe