Prehospital pain management: how would you score it?

Involvement in the management of patients’ pain is a daily event for many ambulance crews, but is there room for improvement? This qualitative, phenomenological study (undertaken in the East Midlands, UK) set out to explore staff and patients’ experiences and opinions of pain management in pre-hospital settings.

Through a process of purposive sampling, 55 people (patients n=17; paramedics n=14; emergency medical technicians n=11; emergency department physicians n=9; emergency department nurses n=4) participated in the study either through focus groups (n=27) or individual interviews (n=28). The interviews enabled the researchers to explore any issues that were raised in the focus groups in more depth.

Patients in the study had to have used the ambulance service within the previous six months. Of the 17 patients, 13 were suffering pain from acute myocardial infarction and the remaining four individuals had sustained a fracture.

Once the audio-recordings of the interviews and focus groups had been transcribed, thematic content analysis facilitated the emergence of key themes, which the authors reported under five broad categories.