Journal of Palliative Care & Medicine
Open Access

Review Article

Patients in Palliative Care with Pressure Ulcers Require Vigilant Pain Management

Sussman Physical Therapy, Inc. and Wound Care Management, A Wound Management Education and Consulting Company, USA

*Corresponding Author:

Carrie Sussman
Sussman Physical Therapy, Inc. and Wound Care Management
A Wound Management Education and Consulting Company, USA
E-mail: bcsussman@aol.com

Received date: July 11, 2013; Accepted date: September 12, 2013; Published date: September 17, 2013

Citation: Sussman C (2013) Patients in Palliative Care with Pressure Ulcers Require Vigilant Pain Management. J Palliat Care Med 3:158. doi:10.4172/2165-7386.1000158

Copyright: © 2013 Sussman C. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

According to findings from studies of patients with pressure ulcers (PU), PU pain is significant. Health care professional (HCP) awareness of PU pain has been growing over the last 15 years but still lacks enough attention at all levels from basic education to advanced clinical practice across disciplines. Pressure ulcers must be appropriately diagnosed as a pressure ulcer and then graded for severity into a stage/category of severity and for pain acuity and chronicity. The purposes of this article are (1) to present validated and reliable tools for measurement of pressure ulcer pain (PU), identify causative factors of PU pain and strategies to alleviate PU pain (2) to provide information that can be incorporated into a framework for health care professionals to use in development of policies and procedures for care of patients with pressure ulcers.

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