Background: Inadequate pain monitoring and management in hospitalized patients poses a serious clinical problem which has been extensively covered in literature for over 25 years.
Objectives: The purpose of the paper was to learn about and compare the existing barriers to effective analgesia controlled by nurses on surgical wards in Polish hospitals.
Material and methods: The study was carried out upon the approval of the study protocol by the Independent Bioethics Committee for Scientific Research of the Medical University of Gdańsk. The research project was multi-center and took a year. The study was questionnaire-based. It used the Polish version of the Nurses' Perceived Obstacles to Pain Assessment and Management Practices questionnaire. The study included a total of 1300 nurses working on surgical wards.
Results: The barriers most frequently observed by the respondents were: disorganization of the healthcare system, physicians' mistrust of pain assessment by nursing staff, difficulty contacting and communicating with physicians to discuss the results of patients' pain assessments and difficulties experienced by elderly patients with completing pain assessment scales.
Conclusions: The barriers most frequently impeding pain therapy in elderly patients are associated with the healthcare system, and they were more frequently present on the anesthesiology and intensive care ward and in the emergency department, and occurred the least frequently on the surgical ward. Patient-related problems were more frequent on the anesthesiology and intensive care wards than in the emergency department. Doctor-related problems most frequently occurred on the gynecological ward, while nurse-related problems were more frequent on the anesthesiology and intensive care ward.