Assesment of the behavioral pain scale using intensive care nurses working in A private hospital for noncommunicable patients

Objective: This study, has been carried out to determine the difficulties that nurses face and how they evaluate the use of behavioral pain scale for patients. Materials and Methods: The study, covers all of 159 intensive care unit nurses. Data was collected with the Pain Assessment on Demographic Characteristics Form and nurses Feedback Questionnaire. The results confidence interval 95%, p <0.05 was considered significant. Findings: It was determined that nurses participating in the study have the requirement of the use of the behavior pain scale and that, in fact, they did use it. When nurses took into account the bottom range of the scale of the 5 main evaluation criteria, it was observed that they experienced doubts when assessing the pain level of noncomunicable patients. Nurses who were unable to communicate verbally with patients experieced doubt as to their accuracy in assessing pain levels. Demographic characteristics of nurses assessing the pain of the patients did not seem to affect realiability of giving the real score. Additionally, it was observed that the average knowledge score of nurses during the assesment of the patient's pain and that the socio-demographic characteristic of the nurse and their way of using behavioral pain scale is insignificant. Result: As a result, intensive care nurses attending uncooperative patients experienced hesistant assessment of the pain evaluation scale due to, insufficient information to assess the pain of noncommunicable patients. The nurses, socio-demographic characteristics didn't influence the knowledge point average.