Pain Management Elderly

1000 Words4 Pages
What Are The Barriers To Effective Pain Management In the Elderly? Rationale for this study The topic of this research was chosen for a combination of personal and professional reasons. While being out on placement within different care settings and working with elderly patients who were in pain due to co-morbidities. During the time spent with older patients and being involved in their care, as a professional it was felt that pain within the elderly was not always well managed through a number of different reasons. With life expectancy average on the increase, there is a growing population of elderly people (National Institute on Aging, 2015). Alongside this over 50 percent of the elderly population living with prolonged pain, pain management…show more content…
Pain also has a categorisation of acute or chronic; pain of less than 12 weeks duration is classified as acute pain and anything longer is chronic pain. Pain management is therefore a way in which healthcare professionals can help to support patients to get their pain under control using analgesic drugs and non-pharmaceutical pain relief strategies. The World Health Organisation has anticipated that the population of elderly people is set to increase twofold within the next 35 years (WHO, 2015). With the yearly cost for pain management across the United Kingdom estimated at £10 billion (Gill, Taylor and Knaggs, 2012). It has been reported that many elderly people do not seek medical help, and those that do can often be under treated because of many different factors. This can majorly impact on their quality of life and daily living (Norelli and Harju, 2008). Therefore added health and social care costs could be incurred as extra support may be needed to help carry out their daily living activities. To control and manage pain in this population it is of an up most importance for health care professionals to understand, in order to prevent the loss of independence, detriments to health and to prevent further…show more content…
The intended methodology for this research will use a systematic literature review. It will use Boolean operators and key words to search for the literature across the range of academic databases previously discussed. To assist the process of literature searching certain exclusions and inclusion criteria will be used. The results will be crossed matched with each other in order to discover the most relevant research articles. To review and analyse the data that has been obtained from the searched a critiquing framework will be used. This study will use a Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP, 2015) in order to appraise and review the quality of the literature. From this appraisal themes can be recognised and this can then be discussed in order to form a solid conclusion to the study and answer the question. From this recommendations could be made for practice, in order to assist how pain is managed within healthcare settings and the elderly and also within their

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