Improving Pain Management in Long-term Care

Abstract

Pain is often unrecognized and undertreated in long-term-care settings. The Beatitudes Campus Health Care Center created the Campaign Against Pain program to improve pain management for residents with chronic pain and short-stay residents with acute pain. The program included education; onsite consultation; individual work groups composed of staff, management, and residents; and the administrative commitment to address the needs of staff and persons residing in the facility within a quality improvement and best practices framework. Using the Minimum Data Set 2.0 Quality Measures for benchmarking, the impact of the training resulted in a drastic reduction in pain in the facility over five quarters for chronic (1.6%) and post-acute care (8.3%), suggesting that change was embedded and sustained over time. The facility met and exceeded the goals of the project and the Advancing Excellence in America's Nursing Home Campaign.