What is it about?
Cancer patients often experience significant pain, which requires ongoing assessment and management by healthcare professionals. Our study explores the use of a tool called Grasp, and how it can be used to support communication and pain assessment between patients and nurses. Grasp is a small, bean-shaped object that patients can squeeze to indicate their pain. These squeezes are recorded and shown as visualizations on a web interface that can later be reviewed. By introducing the tool in a Norwegian palliative cancer ward, we explored how it encouraged patients to report their pain more often. The visualizations from the squeezes also helped open up conversations between patients and nurses and produced a more comprehensive 24-hour picture of the patient's pain experiences compared to standard practice alone.
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Why is it important?
Pain is a common experience for cancer patients and those in palliative care, making proper pain assessment crucial to ensure effective treatment and management. However, because pain is so subjective, it can be difficult for patients to express and share their experiences. Traditionally, pain is measured using numerical (e.g., a 0-10 scale) or verbal scales (e.g., no pain, moderate pain, severe pain). While these methods allow patients to report pain intensity as a single number or word, they often fail to capture the full complexity of an individual’s pain experience. Some patients also find these scales hard to relate to. Effective pain assessment also involves the communication between patients and healthcare providers. Instead of solely focusing on refining or developing new scales which is a common theme in existing research, it may be valuable to consider pain assessment in a broader context that goes beyond self-reports. Our study adopts this broader approach by combining insights from previous research on alternative pain assessment methods with a focus on the communication between patients and nurses during the pain assessment process. This combination aims to enhance understanding of patients pain and improve the overall assessment of pain in clinical settings.
Perspectives
Working closely with nurses and hearing about their experiences and deep care for their patients has been particularly eye-opening. While pain is something we all experience, exploring its many dimensions and facets has given me new perspectives on why pain assessment remains so challenging. I hope you feel the same after reading it. Instead of focusing solely on numeric measurements, our article delves into the human side of pain assessment, emphasizing the important role of communication between nurses and patients in truly understanding and managing pain. I hope our work can encourage further research on how to support clinical pain assessment and communication through innovative and unconventional methods.
Louise Sandal Løkeland
Universitetet i Bergen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Tangible Interactions for Pain Assessment in Palliative Care, October 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3679318.3685336.
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