Student Nurses' Experiences and Reflections on Pain Management in the Clinical Setting: An Exploratory Analysis of Students' Choice of Assignment Topic.

BACKGROUND: Pain, particularly chronic pain, represents a global health burden. The provision of undergraduate pain education for health professionals remains suboptimal, and yet pain features as an important competency for successful licensure in Canada.

PURPOSE: To explore what clinical events undergraduate nursing students identify as critical to their learning. If pain featured, then to describe the nature of the pain incident.

METHODS: A retrospective cross-sectional design with a thematic analysis of year 3 undergraduate student nurses' assignments was used. For the assignments identified as related to pain, a more detailed inductive content analysis was used to provide a condensed but broad description of the data.

RESULTS: A total of 215 students participated. The most reported topics were pain (14.8%), patient assessment (10.2%), patient-/family-centered care (10.2%), and effective communication (9.8%). For those who described a pain encounter in their clinical experience, advocacy, managing the gap, and a lack of knowledge were the main focus.

CONCLUSIONS: This study provided valuable insights to the ways in which student nurses wrote about their experiences and management of pain in the clinical setting. Strengthening learning in the nursing curricula around advocacy and conflict management might provide new ways to improve pain education.