Nursing Global Conference

The most significant areas of nursing science are pain management and palliative care, focusing on how a patient's condition can be reduced and the quality of a patient's life enhanced, mainly for patients who experience chronic, complex, or terminal conditions. In pain management and palliative care, a nurse takes the key part of caring with compassion but also helping to eradicate pains and discomforts in order to offer emotional support to the patient as well as his or her family. This module will focus on core competencies for the nurse in pain management and palliative care: best practice in symptom management, patient-centered care, and holistic compassionate practice.

There is general consensus in literature over the last twenty years that pain management is an integral component of both general and palliative nursing care. Nurses are educated about a systematic assessment approach for pain but acute, chronic, or episodic pain lasting more than minutes at a time that interferes with any dimension of daily living. Pain management strategies are going to be pharmacological but also be massage, relaxation practices, applications of heat or cold, among others. The nurses will engage the patients through a dialogue process and ensure that the patients receive appropriate interventions with which they can have their pain attacks reduced to an extent with minimal side effects.

Palliative care is not just pain management but aims to meet the diverse needs of patients with serious illnesses. With this approach, it provides comfort, dignity, and quality of life. It highlights relief of symptoms related to nausea, pain, fatigue, and shortness of breath. The nursing care is multidimensional as it relates to the patient's needs in a manner that touches the physical, emotional, and spiritual need. In the nurses' care environment, there is relief as they offer relief in that journey to health for the patients. This always involves important decisions related to treatment alternatives and goals of care. Thus, one the most important areas of support to the patient is in making these selections.

The core strength of palliative care nursing lies in family support. Such care requires the nurse to have an ongoing close working relationship with families where they are guided on how to care for their loved one, given emotional support, and educated on what they could expect from their loved one's developing condition. In cases of end-of-life, the nurses provide sympathetic care while, in keeping with dignity, trying as much as possible to put the patients in a comfort zone that the support being offered to their loved ones in their own time is emotional. This may encompass bereavement counseling as well as resources of help during and after their loved one has passed away.

This session also will include best practices in pain management and palliative care in the assessment techniques, teamwork through a multidisciplinary approach, and how nurse-patient relationships are established. Issues outside of difficult symptom management include effective communication skills and self-care for nurses who work in challenging fields. The guidelines provide the support for the nurse to offer quality compassionate care that fosters improvement in the well-being of patients and their families.

The guidelines are to be treated as an expansion framework in regard to specialized care about pain management and palliative care by reminding nurses to provide dignified comfort and sympathetic support to those in need.