Among healthcare professionals, pain is well-known as a consequence of surgery and becomes unpleasant sensory and emotional experience linked to potential damage of tissues. Patients who have had surgery are advised to use analgesic medication, although the pain does not seem to reduce. So, pain after surgery among patients remains a critical area of concern among nurses. As a result, a patient undergoing such pain lacks sleep and appetite and may be forced to prolonged hospitalization. This post-operative pain, if not reduced, causes preoperative and post-operative patients to experience loss of control, fear of the unknown, fear of pain, anxiety, and uncertainty.
Interestingly, psychological and physical stress are associated with surgery pain and make a patient take a long period before he or he can recover from surgery. In most cases, patients using opioids to reduce surgical pain get negative results associated with unwanted side effects. As a result, there is a need for a health professional to find new and adequate postoperative pain reduction methods that do not cause long term adverse side effects such as dyspepsia, nausea, and constipation. If non-pharmacological can effectively reduce post-operative pain, then this is a significantly affordable intervention without side effects.
In the library database search box, the first search “clinical issue” did not bring back a specific issue of interest. It took trials and errors to establish the correct search terms that worked best for the topic. I ran various searches such as “pain, surgery, surgery pain, and operative pain” in my quest for the keywords that assisted in finding the right clinical issue of interest, post-operative pain. By trying out these words, I allowed the database to find all of the articles on my main topics of interest, which I then evaluated to see if they match my need. I identified “pain” and post-operative” as key terms in which the search results from database brought “post-operative pain” articles with adequate information explaining the clinical issue.
These four-research databases contain multidisciplinary research articles that have evidence-based findings in the clinical issue of interest. They cover every level of healthcare with complete collection of full-text nursing journals with a variety of peer-reviewed topics or titles. For instance, Nursing Reference Center Plus provides access to over fifty full-text peer-reviewed nursing research journals. These scholarly articles are not common in other databases. Also, these scholarly journal articles regarding nursing and allied health includes nursing interventions, management, nursing education, theory, and history.