Attitudes towards pain management in hospitalized cancer patients and their influencing factors

OBJECTIVE To investigate patients' attitudes towards cancer pain management and analyze the factors influencing these attitudes. METHODS The self-developed Demographic and Disease-Related Information Questionnaires, Pain Management Barriers Questionnaire-Taiwan form (BQT), and Pain Knowledge Questionnaire were administered to 363 pairs of hospitalized cancer patients and their caregivers from the oncology departments of 7 hospitals in Beijing, China. RESULTS The average patient score for attitudes towards pain management was 2.96±0.49. The dimension scores indicated good attitudes in three areas (scores <2.5), "Desire to be good" (2.22±1.04), "Fatalism" (2.08±0.81) and "Religious fatalism" (1.86±1.00), and poor attitudes in six areas (scores ≥2.5), "Tolerance" (3.83±0.96), "Use of analgesics as needed (p.r.n.)" (3.73±1.01), "Addiction" (3.44±1.05), "Disease progression" (3.28±1.26), "Distraction of physicians" (3.16±1.07) and "Side effects" (2.99±0.68). Two factors were entered into the regression equation: the caregivers' attitudes towards cancer pain management and the patients' pain knowledge. These two factors explained 23.2% of the total variance in the patients' average scores for their attitudes towards cancer pain management. CONCLUSIONS The patients' attitudes towards cancer pain management were poor and could be influenced by the caregivers' attitudes and the patients' pain knowledge, and thus need to be improved.