Campaign highlights need to access dementia patients’ pain

REGINA As dementia patients’ ability to clearly communicate deteriorates, they are often unable to express if they are in pain, which is why Thomas Hadjistavropoulos wants to see health care providers intentionally assessing for pain more frequently.

People with severe dementia cannot verbally communicate, so their caregivers are left trying to understand their needs based on non-verbal cues. Without systematic observation over time, Hadjistavropoulos said these cues are often misinterpreted or missed altogether.

“Pain problems are very often missed in long-term care facilities. We hear actually tragic stories anecdotally from nursing staff of serious pain problems that were missed for days, sometimes longer,” said the psychology professor and Research Chair in Aging and Health at the University of Regina.

If pain isn’t treated, Hadjistavropoulos said patients can become “quite agitated.” This agitation can be misinterpreted as a psychiatric issue, leading to psychotropic medications being used to calm the patient without recognizing and treating the root problem of pain.

Assessing for pain does not have to be difficult or time-consuming, but Hadjistavropoulos said many of the checklists being used to spot pain have been recently created based on new research, so they are not being widely used yet. He noted it typically takes medical research 17 years to filter into standard clinical practice, but with an issue as prevalent and as easily fixed as this, he said this is far too long.

To raise awareness of the pain assessments available to health care providers, Hadjistavropoulos launched the social media campaign #Seepainmoreclearly.