Applying Middle Range Theory to a Practice Problem
One of the most common reasons people go to the hospital, is for complaints of pain. Pain management in a hospital setting, is a growing problem in healthcare. More and
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Applying Middle Range Theory to a Practice Problem
One of the most common reasons people go to the hospital, is for complaints of pain. Pain management in a hospital setting, is a growing problem in healthcare. More and more people are developing chronic pain and don’t know how else to ease the pain aside from taking opioids, and even then—sometimes— the medications people take are not fully effective. As stated in the article, Pain Management Practice, “nearly 50 million American adults have significant chronic pain and the NHIS study estimates that within a previous three-month period, 25 million United States adults had daily chronic pain and 23 million reported severe pain” (Noonan, 2018). Physicians often prescribe opioids to treat pain in order to relieve a patient from suffering. As a result of this, people have developed opioid use disorders. An estimated amount of 2 million people in the United States have been found to abuse prescription painkillers (Noonan, 2018). According to NIH, statistics showed that 33,000 deaths occurred from opioid overdose in 2015 and went to nearly 42,000 annually in 2018 (Woods, 2018). In the nursing practice, we can find more creative ways of managing pain and use nursing theory as a foundation to help guide which direction we can go.
A nursing theorist named Katharine Kolcaba, developed a theory in the 1990s called The Theory of Comfort. This is a middle-range theory that has been used in healthcare and showed considerable results in nursing practice. The Theory of Comfort originated back when Kolcaba was in an MSN program for nursing and did a presentation, and used comfort to designate the state she wanted her patients to be when they weren’t trying to perform special tasks (Kolcaba, 2010). At her presentation she was asked if she had done a concept analysis of comfort (Kolcaba, 2010).
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