Pain management: a quality improvement project

Pain management in the PACU is vital to patient care and favorable outcomes. Understanding all aspects of pain management is essential when caring for surgical patients. Most PACUs have quality improvement (QI) and/or risk management projects that involve pain management. This article discusses a QI project on the management of pain and the effect it had on nursing practice. The QI committee developed an improvement program that identified a patient care need and changed practice to improve patient care. The project began with the question "Are we accurately assessing patients' pain, or is the pain assessed only what the nurse perceives?" The QI data collected indicated that 100% of patients were discharged with adequate pain relief. The question was answered by following the recommendations of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations for the QI process, in addition to using a model for linking outcomes to care processes developed by Windle and Houston.