A hospital-based quasi-experimental (pretest and post-test) study was conducted in Kaohsiung Veteran General Hospital, Taiwan. This study was to evaluate a continuing education program (CEP) on nurses' practices of cancer pain assessment and their acceptance of patients' pain reports with respect to four types of misconceptions. A questionnaire was sent to on-duty nurses or head nurses with patient care responsibilities before the implementation of CEP (n=645) and six months after the program (n=630). The response rates were 92.6% and 91.3% for pretest and post-test surveys, respectively. The CEP was implemented in 8 weeks with four-repeated sessions of 4-hour lectures. A one-day workshop focused on cancer pain assessment and treatment was held 3 months after the four-repeated sessions. Several educational strategies and teaching materials were used in the CEP. The results showed that CEP made statistically significant yet moderate improvement in nurses' practices of pain assessment using pain rating scales (pretest 3.29+/-0.76 vs. post-test 3.48+/-0.75, P<0.001) and acceptance of patient's pain reports without misconceptions on addiction (3.12+/-0.80 vs. 3.39+/-0.90, P<0.001), phantom pain (3.91+/-0.96 vs. 4.07+/-0.92, P=0.005), and placebo testing (3.63+/-0.72 vs. 3.81+/-0.73, P<0.001), except on patient gender-age-related doubts (3.60+/-0.72 vs. 3.67+/-0.77, P=0.109). In order to achieve further improvement, additional follow-up CEP combined with a hospital-wide institutionalization of pain assessment should be promoted and implemented in the future.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.