Poor pain management? I blame Margot......

Without doubt the most significant development in pain management in the UK was the publication, in 1990, of the College of Anaesthetists and Royal College of Surgeons working party report on pain after surgery. It was this report that lead to the creation of Acute Pain Services who would take the lead for improving pain management in hospitals.  Since then analgesic drugs have improved, we have better delivery methods and awareness of the importance of good pain management in a patients recovery has been fully emphasised. So, the question remains – why are patients still experiencing poor quality pain management?

Personally I blame Margot McCaffery. She it was who coined the annoying phrase “pain is what the patient says it is and occurs when the patient says it does”. On the face of it, there is little wrong with this, it raises the importance of believing patients when they say that they are in pain and that can only be a good thing, furthermore it’s catchy and easy to remember – and that is the bit I object to. It seems to me that one could walk into any clinical area in any hospital in the UK and say “Complete this sentence. Pain is what the patient says it is and.....” then brace yourself for the noise of all the staff finishing it off in loud and confident unison. The problem is that although every nurse in the UK knows and believes this statement, hardly any of them act as if they believe it. I think the difficulty if that this short statement has a nice bouncy rhythm, like the old drinka-pinta-milk-a-day or clunk-click-every-trip, to it that makes it easy to parrot and trot out at appropriate time. It has the advantage of sounding clinically empathetic without having to invest a great deal of intellectual effort. Nobody stops to consider that often pain is more than the patient says it is and occurs more often than the patient says it does.  It also implicitly excludes those patients who, for whatever reason, will have difficulty communicating their pain to the health care profession. Thus, despite parroting this annoying little phrase at every opportunity, there is little evidence that patients are believed when they report their pain, significant evidence that certain sections of society and not only disbelieved but labelled as drug abusers when they report their pain, and no evidence at all that a patients previous history of analgesic use is taken into account when prescribing and administering pain killing drugs.

It seems to me that despite all those better drugs, better delivery systems, enhanced prescribing practices and more supposedly patient/practitioner partnerships, pain management is still poor in the UK and it’s all down to McCaffery and her annoying little phrase. Time, I think, for educators and nurses to leave it behind and move on towards genuinely believing what patients tell them about pain and using their not inconsiderable resources to alleviate it.