By Elizabeth Joly, RN, BScN, BSc, MN-APL Student
Pain care continues to be a resistant issue in today’s health care system and nurse leaders play a key role improving the quality of pain care. In a course focused on systems leadership and health policy in the MN Advanced Practice Leadership program, we were provided with a unique opportunity to collaborate with nurse leaders across Island Health to explore and analyze issues related to pain care. My partner for the assignment, Elizabeth McMurray, and I were assigned a nurse leader responsible for orthopedics and rehabilitation at Royal Jubilee Hospital. In a telephone interview, we asked the nurse leader to describe a situation in which she addressed a pain care challenge, with additional prompts such as “what was it like for you as a nurse leader?” and “what was the impact of your involvement?”
This nurse leader shared a story of how her leadership contributed to improving the quality of pain care for patients with amputations. We analyzed the story using questions focused on the key message and leadership qualities and competencies, reviewed the literature relevant to pain assessment and facilitators and barriers of adequate pain care and prepared an executive summary of our analysis relative to this literature, which we shared with nurse leaders at Island Health.
Most prominent in our analysis was the important role nurse leaders play in advocating not only for patients experiencing pain but also for the nurses with whom they work. We identified multiple strategies for improving pain care for vulnerable populations such as amputees, including advocating for a collaborative multidisciplinary project spanning the continuum of care and providing resources to nurses to enhance their capacity to provide competent pain care.
So often in the confines of the (virtual) classroom, learning arises from discussion of the literature and our own experiences. The opportunity to collaborate with nurse leaders to incorporate their experiential knowledge into our coursework broadened my learning and led to a new understanding of the importance of collaboration in contributing to the knowledge base for nurse leaders to improve pain care.
From the 2015 Spring Communiqué — In Collaboration with Island Health
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