Evaluation of nursing students' pain knowledge level

Pain management is one of the fundamental and essential points of health care since the pain is the most effective disease that makes people seek treatment. Nurses often encounter this disease and effective pain management requires well know-how and sophisticated pain assessment.The research was conducted as descriptive, in order to determine the knowledge of nursing students and make suggestions about building their know-how about pain and pain management.The research was applied with 396 nursing students from one of the nursing academy in Istanbul during the period of May 9th and May 13th of 2011. Data set is derived from a questionnaire which consists of two main section. First section queries the socio-demographic features of nursing students. In the second section, data were collected by using the questionnaire which was developed according to the literature review and included 24 questions related to pain and pain management. Data set analysis was conducted by using SPSS version 16.0. NCSS (Number Cruncher Statistical System) 2007&PASS (Power Analysis and Sample Size) 2008 Statistical Software (Utah, USA), Oneway Anova test and Tukey HDS and Student t test was applied in the statistical analysis of the data set.According to the Pain Knowledge Questionnaire, ?Pain Physiopathology? section has the highest score among the nursing students with the average 64,60±13,14. ?Pain Assessment? section has the average score of 47,56±17,19 and ?Pain Control? section has the average score of 56,90±12,99. Nursing student sample has the average score of 57,13±9,40 in all sub-dimensions.The Pain Knowledge Questionnaire score of nursing students that encounters frequently with painful individuals, educated about pain management and has working experience, are more than the others. According to these evidences, suggestions about building nursing students? know-how about pain and pain management are proposed.