African Journal of Nursing and Midwifery

African Journal of Nursing and Midwifery ISSN 2198-4638 Vol. 2 (6), pp. 323-325, August, 2015. © International Scholars Journals

Full Length Research Paper

A study of nurses’ attitude and belief towards the assessment of pain of patients hospitalized at Federal Teaching Hospital, Abakaliki, Nigeria

*Okoye Ezuruonye, Peter N. chris and Nnamdi Mike

Department of Nursing Science, Faculty of medicine, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.

*Corresponding author’s E-mail: [email protected]

Accepted 2 July, 2015

Abstract

The study of nurses’ actions and opinions during pain assessment of hospitalized patients’ pain was done using cross – sectional descriptive research design. 450 nurses randomly selected from Federal Teaching Hospital, Abakaliki, Ebonyi State capital were used for the study. Questionnaire developed by the researchers whose reliability was established using test – retest technique was used as instrument. Descriptive statistics of mean and percentage were used to analyze the qualitative data. Nurses from the two hospitals were aware of the basic component of pain assessment with mean score greater than 3.00 in a five paint hedonic scale . They agreed that they assess pain routinely when other vital signs are checked, during initial health assessment, when patients complain of pain, before and other giving pain relieving drugs with mean score of 3.99, 4.17, 4.11 and 4.13 respectively. These results indicate that nurses know what to do during the pain assessment of patients in the hospital. It is recommended that nurse should be given more training to sustain their knowledge and further studies should be carried out to ascertain if they really do those things.

Key Words: Nurses’ action, pain assessment, hospitalized patient, Nurses’ Opinion.