Knowledge, Attitude, and Skills of Clinical Decision Making on Pain in Emergency and Trauma Nurses: A Cross-Sectional...

Emergency and trauma nurses have important responsibilities in pain management. Emergency units are the first point of admission to the hospital for patients owing to trauma, burns, acute abdominal pain, and various injuries, and these patient groups experience acute pain of varying severity. The pain experienced by emergency and trauma patients plays an active role in the deterioration of their clinical conditions. This study aimed to describe the knowledge, attitudes, and clinical decision-making skills of emergency and trauma nurses regarding pain.

The data for this observational and cross-sectional study were collected in the emergency and trauma unit of a state hospital in Istanbul. A personal information form, the Nurses' Knowledge and Attitudes Survey Regarding Pain, and the clinical decision-making questionnaire were used for data collection. Descriptive, Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis, and Bonferroni tests were used in the data analysis.

According to the results obtained in this study, 87.8% of the nurses were working in the emergency unit, and 12.2% in the trauma clinic. The mean score obtained by the nurses from the knowledge and attitude survey was 10.31 ± 2.87 (minimum, 3; maximum, 16). Although 63.4% of the nurses considered patient behaviors in defining pain, 32.9% considered the patient's facial expression. Furthermore, 59.8% of the nurses stated that they experienced problems during pain management. No statistically significant difference was found between the personal information of the nurses and their pain-related knowledge and attitude survey scores (P>.05). Nurses who defined pain severity according to the patient's behaviors and expressions obtained higher scores in the knowledge and attitude subdimension.

As a result of this study, the knowledge, attitudes, and clinical decision-making skills of emergency and trauma nurses regarding pain were slightly above the midrange of the scale. This result may lead to inadequate relief of pain in emergency and trauma patients. Strategies and proposed solutions should be developed to improve the knowledge, attitude, and clinical decision-making skills of nurses.