Samantha Ganey Aquino on a Study of Pain Assessment

Samantha Ganey Aquino, MSN, AGPCNP-BC, from Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Medical Center, discusses results from a study of pain assessment.

Aquino says she and her colleagues noticed that nurses were not always assessing pain and physicians were not documenting pain in their notes. This study started with education: Aquino and her team instructed nurses to assess a patient’s pain at every encounter. The team also asked radiation therapists, social workers, nutritionists and more to get involved with pain assessment. The final part of the intervention, Aquino says, was to tell physicians to include patient pain score in their notes.

Pain assessment was done in 20-30% of patients before the study and 90-100% of patients after the study.