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.