Collaborative working in cancer pain management
Intended for healthcare professionals
Evidence and practice    

Collaborative working in cancer pain management

Angela Telford Nurse specialist acute pain, Anaesthetics, Freeman Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Newcastle, England
Denise O’Neill Nurse specialist palliative care, Freeman Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Newcastle, England

Despite recent attention to pain assessment and management, cancer pain remains a significant clinical problem worldwide. A total of 38% of cancer patients experience moderate to severe pain that is unresponsive to conventional analgesia and may benefit from additional pain interventions. With expert management, for most people with cancer, pain can be treated effectively with conventional pharmacological approaches, however a minority find either that analgesic management strategies provide suboptimal pain relief or cause excessive side effects.

This article describes how collaborative working between a specialist palliative care team and acute pain service can help provide the most effective pain relief for this group of patients. The article uses a case study to describe how the teams work with the wider multidisciplinary cancer team to provide coordinated support and pain management for patients and their families.

Cancer Nursing Practice. doi: 10.7748/cnp.2019.e1560

Peer review

This article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and has been checked for plagiarism using automated software

Correspondence

angela.telford@nuth.nhs.uk

Conflict of interest

None declared

Telford A, O’Neill D (2019) Collaborative working in cancer pain management. Cancer Nursing Practice. doi: 10.7748/cnp.2019.e1560

Published online: 06 February 2019

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