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Incidence and characteristics of pain in a sample of medical-surgical inpatients
Abstract
The purposes of this study were to determine the incidence and characteristics of pain in hospitalized patients and to explore the type and perceived effectiveness of pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic therapies. Three hundred and fifty-three randomly selected patients reported experiencing pain during this hospitalization; 58% of these patients experienced excruciating pain. Fewer than half of the patients with pain had a member of the health care team ask them about their pain or note the pain in the patient record. The methods perceived as most effective in decreasing pain were analgesics, sleep, immobilization and distraction. As in earlier studies, the dose of analgesic administered over a 24-h period was less than a quarter of the amount ordered. This study concluded that (1) pain in hospitalized patients is more prevalent than has previously been reported, (2) patients with pain continue to receive inadequate dosages of analgesics, and (3) the identification and treatment of patients with pain remains a significant health care problem.
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Citations
Cited by
Preoperative prediction of severe postoperative pain
Kalkman, J. C., Visser, K., Moen, J., Bonsel, J. G., Grobbee, E. D., & Moons, M. K. G. (2003) · Pain · doi:10.1016/s0304-3959(03)00252-5 · Cited by 616
The prevalence of postoperative pain in a sample of 1490 surgical inpatients
Sommer, M., de Rijke, J. M., van Kleef, M., Kessels, A. G. H., Peters, M. L., Geurts, J. W. J. M., Gramke, H.-F., & Marcus, M. A. E. (2008) · European Journal of Anaesthesiology · doi:10.1017/s0265021507003031 · Cited by 471
Bair, M. J., Matthias, M. S., Nyland, K. A., Huffman, M. A., Stubbs, D. L., Kroenke, K., & Damush, T. M. (2009) · Pain Medicine · doi:10.1111/j.1526-4637.2009.00707.x · Cited by 259
Pain and Satisfaction With Pain Control in Hospitalized Medical Patients: No Such Thing as Low Risk
Whelan, C. T., Jin, L., & Meltzer, D. (2004) · Archives of Internal Medicine · doi:10.1001/archinte.164.2.175 · Cited by 100
Pain: paradigms and treatments
Macrae, W. A., Davies, H. T. O., & Crombie, I. K. (1992) · Pain · doi:10.1016/0304-3959(92)90233-2 · Cited by 13
Metadata
- Authors
- Donovan, M., Dillon, P., & McGuire, L.
- Venue
- Pain
- Published
- 1987-07
- Volume
- 30
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 69-78
- ISSN
- 0304-3959 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2017404535
- Cited by
- 427
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 15.53
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Incidence and characteristics of pain in a sample of medical-surgical inpatients. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/0304-3959(87)90084-4
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- Donovan, M., Dillon, P., & McGuire, L. (1987). Incidence and characteristics of pain in a sample of medical-surgical inpatients. Pain. https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-3959(87)90084-4
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
