Pain: an account of nurses' talk

This paper examines how nurses refer to pain and pain management in their talk. The documentation of talk was established after engaging a group of five nurses in a series of in-depth unstructured interviews lasting approximately 1 hour, in which they were encouraged to discuss their ideas regarding how postoperative pain should be managed, to render it more effective as an aspect of patient care. However, the talk revealed that nurses tended to categorize patients according to symptoms or overt pain behaviours. This essentially resulted in patients not being believed when they signalled that pain was becoming a distressing symptom. The paper also discusses how nurses' knowledge regarding pain and pain management influences the way in which they manage postoperative pain.