Pain is a major element of many medical problems. Properly assessing where a patient is feeling pain, the type of pain, and to what degree the pain is being felt are key to your overall assessment. From there, you need to know how to manage the pain and that can be individual to each patient. Pain management training courses can help you to feel comfortable in your assessment and management of a patient’s pain.
The Importance of Pain Management
Should a medical professional fail to properly assess a patient’s pain, this can have dire consequences. Patients are not just affected by pain on a physical level but an emotional level as well and dealing with chronic, unmanaged pain can greatly decrease a person’s quality of life. This is why it is so important to carefully assess each patient and understand the pain that they are experiencing. Sometimes, doctors and nurses can miss an important diagnosis because they did not accurately assess the pain a patient was experiencing, whether this is because they underestimated the severity of the pain or did not properly judge what type of pain it was.
Proper pain management is the next step after pain assessment. Knowing what kind of pain you’re dealing with is half the battle; you have to know how to handle that pain as well. There are a variety of methods out there, from medications to physical therapy to alternative methods. What type of pain management is best will depend on the individual patient and their pain. No one method is right for every single person. Being able to help decide on the best pain management routine for a patient is another key factor increasing a patient’s quality of life.
Pain Management Training Courses
Pain management is something that you learn when you enter into any medical profession, of course. Depending on where you studied and what exactly you have a degree or certificate in, though, you might feel like it’s not your strongest suit. That is where continuing education and additional certification courses come in.
One site where you can find pain management training courses is ExpertRating. Both companies and individual people use this site for training in a variety of fields, from Life Coaching to SEO to First Aid and more. In fact, over 800 skills are taught on this site. Some of the courses and certifications offered count as continuing education credits to be used in your own professional development in the field you’re already in. Others can be used as certifications all by themselves and you can use these to help train yourself and move into a new career.
Over 3 million people have received certifications from ExpertRating in the past 18 years. The certifications show employers that you have gained knowledge from a trusted source. Companies like IKEA and Gap also use ExpertRating for employee testing services. Because of its good track record and rapport with many companies, a certification from ExpertRating can go a long way.
What You’ll Learn
The ExpertRating Online Pain Management Course is a good place to start if you want to learn more about pain management. The course is designed for nurses of all levels (including nursing students) and is obviously helpful for medical professionals, as a failure to properly identify and assess pain is one of the major errors medical professionals can make with their patients.
Physical therapists, in-home care assistants, hospital volunteers, and occupational therapists, as well as others in related fields, can gain knowledge from this course as well. This course may also be helpful to people dealing with chronic pain or their loved ones as a way of understanding pain and getting some ideas on how to manage it.
This course has 24 contact hours. The main goal of the course is to help nurses better work with patients who are in pain. It goes over key elements involved in the assessment, treatment, and management of pain, both chronic and temporary. After you have taken this course, you should understand the latest pain management and assessment methods.
This course is a continuing education course, so it should build upon knowledge that you already have as a nurse and allow you to build your skills and increase your competency when it comes to pain management. Aside from that, the course is also a great thing to have on your resume when applying for new jobs.
This course has six subsections, each consisting of four contact hours. First up is Pain Theory and Assessment Principles where you will begin learning the basics behind what pain is and how you identify and assess it. One key thing you will learn is that pain is subjective and you need to trust the experience of your patients. What one patient describes as excruciating pain may be more manageable for another patient but this does not mean that either patient is “lying” about what they are experiencing.
This chapter will teach you how to conduct a pain assessment, what barriers you may come across when assessing pain, and how to properly document your assessment. You will also learn the different types of pain. Next up is Interventions and Treatment of Pain where you will get an overview of the many types of pain treatments and interventions that are available out there, both old and new.
The next three courses deal with pain management for different populations of people. Working with people of different ages adds a new level to pain management: you don’t treat the chronic pain of a young adult, a child, and an elderly patient the same way.
Pain Management in the Adult: Chronic and Acute focuses on how you treat different types of pain adult patients may be experiencing. This section is designed for the pain of otherwise healthy adults and those who are not experiencing pain due to medical problems like cancer.
Pain Management in Special Populations: Surgery, Cancer, and HIV is where you will learn about dealing with the pain experienced by patients with conditions like cancer or HIV or who are having pain following surgery. Pain Management in Special Populations: Children and the Elderly is where you’ll learn about working with the very young and the very old when assessing and managing pain.
The final course is Treatment of Pain at the End of Life. One thing nurses, caregivers, loved ones, etc. may have to deal with at some point is dealing with the pain of someone on their deathbed. This is a unique circumstance and there are different ways to deal with the type of pain experienced by people nearing the end of their lives, no matter the exact cause of the pain.
When you are enrolled in this course, you have 24/7 access to all the course materials including videos, tutorials, and workbooks. There is also a printable version of the course available so you can study while offline. The courses have a live instructor available and are not just archived versions of a course so someone is available to answer your questions and clear up any confusion you may have.
Additionally, there are discussion boards within the course where you can speak with other students who are taking the course and get their insight as well. Each chapter includes assignments and case studies to grow your skills with activities instead of just lectures and at the end of every chapter, you will take a quiz to test your knowledge.
The final exam at the end of the course should be a no-brainer if you’ve carefully paid attention to the course and have done well on all the assignments and quizzes. The exam material is taken 100% from the course and no other outside knowledge is needed to pass it.
While the course is not on-demand, there is a new one starting every month and you do not have to attend scheduled live lectures in order to pass it. The course material is available to you all throughout the six weeks of the course and if you want to keep notes or have information to review when the course is through, there are printable materials available to you as well.
The course is accredited and approved by a variety of bodies and should be accepted for CE credits in every state but you should check before signing up for the course that it will be accepted for your continuing education needs.
Help Your Patients with Pain Management
Whether a patient needs temporary pain management techniques following knee surgery or they need ongoing treatment due to chronic pain, it is important that the doctors and nurses they work with are able to accurately assess their pain and then offer the best pain management techniques they can.
Chronic pain that is undiagnosed can be excruciating, even more so if a patient is continuously dealing with doctors who are failing to properly assess their pain as a chronic problem. Pain that is managed improperly also takes a toll on the patient. Each patient is different. Their pain is different and the way you manage that pain is different. By taking pain management training courses, medical professionals can better understand how to assess and treat pain so that their patients can live better lives.