The experience of chronic back pain: accounts of loss in those seeking help from pain clinics.

Background: This study responded to the need for greater understanding of the experiences that help to shape the worldviews of chronic back patients as they seek help from pain clinics.

Aim: To elaborate on the lived experience of chronic back pain in those actively seeking help from pain clinics.

Methods: This was a qualitative study, based on an interpretative phenomenological approach.

Chronic pain as perceived by older people: a qualitative study.

Background: the practical issues confronting older people who suffer chronic pain may not be tackled in a pain clinic setting and little is known of their strategies for coping. They seem to have little or no information on how to improve the quality of their lives or on resources available to them.

Aim: the aim of this study was to ascertain from older people the practical, physical and psychosocial limitations they faced because of chronic pain, and the strategies they used to deal with them.

In the system: the lived experience of chronic back pain from the perspectives of those seeking help from pain clinics.

Narrative accounts of their lived experiences were collected from twenty back pain patients who were seeking help from two pain clinics in the UK. Following analysis using a phenomenological approach, five themes emerged which tell a typical story of back pain. One prominent emergent theme, 'in the system', is reported in which participants tell how they became entrapped within the medical, social security and legal systems.

Predictors of psychological distress in chronic pain patients.

The purpose of this study was to identify sources of psychological distress in patients attending pain clinics. Patients attending two pain clinics in the UK completed a self-report assessment questionnaire which included a 12-item, 5-point semantic differential measure of psychological well-being/distress, together with a range of single-item measures of pain and psychosocial factors measured using 5-point verbal report scales. Multiple regression analysis identified that 60% of the variance associated with psychological distress was explained by a combination of fears about the future, regrets about the past, age (younger people were more distressed), practical help (more help was associated with more distress), feeling unoccupied and personal relationship problems.

Enhancing humanistic skills: an experiential approach to learning about ethical issues in health care.

An outstanding feature of the study of nursing ethics is that it raises questions concerning moral virtue, conscience, consistency and character. A considerable section of the literature is devoted to ideas of how best to teach ethics to health professionals. It has been shown that when faced with ethical dilemmas nurses tended to rely on intuition and instinct to resolve them, with little systematic analysis to help the process.