I’m a frontline nurse manager from Interim Healthcare of Hartford and I’m pleased to share the wonderful experience I had participating in CHAMP’s Geriatric Pain Management course.
Participating in the course has been tremendously helpful for my team. The online course was easy to navigate and the helpful video vignettes provided a meaningful context for the material. Topics like adjuvant medications and thinking about the pain assessment process helped my team to really go further with their assessments, looking at the whole patient and collaborating with them in managing their pain.
The course gave us numerous helpful tools that we use every day, such as the Faces and Numerical rating scales. And the tools for assessing pain in dementia patients were especially helpful to my staff since we have never seen these tools before. The CHAMP faculty pharmacist, Dennee Frey, was very helpful with opioid use, especially the information on short-acting versus long-acting medications. She helped us understand how we could safely use higher doses of certain pain medications with certain patients. Dennee still provides us with wonderful information in her regular blog posts on CHAMP’s web site. Her blog posts are easy to print out and serve as a great reference.
As a frontline nurse manager, I feel that my team members are more aware of the impact pain has on their patients’ lives, and thanks to the CHAMP Program, they have been able to work with their patients to better assess and manage pain.
To view some of the pain management tools provided in the CHAMP Pain Management Course, click on the links below:
- Faces Pain Scale
- Numeric Rating Scale (NRS)
- Assessing Pain in Older Adults with Dementia
- Review of Pharmacological Pain Management
- Review of the Ask, Listen and Observe Technique
Michele Parker, Frontline Nurse Manager
Interim Healthcare
Hartford, CT
