[The oncologic patient with chronic pain. An approach on care from the nursing perspective]

This is a study of descriptive, exploratory and qualitative nature. It aims at identifying how nurses perceive chronic pain in cancer patients and analyses how nurses care for cancer patients with chronic pain. There were semistructured interviews with an intentional sample of six nurses from the services of Chemotherapy and Medicine III from the Baixo Alentejo Hospital Center. We found that the nurses understand pain through verbal and non verbal language of patients. Nurses pointed out some difficulties with the assessement of pain, the pharmacologic and non-phamarcologic treatments.