Twice-daily pain monitoring as standard clinical practice for inpatients at a medical oncology unit: a descriptive study.

BACKGROUND Very limited experiences have explored the use of pain intensity monitoring in everyday clinical practice at a medical oncology inpatient unit. METHODS The program 'Pain-Free Hospital,' including a training course for nurses and the recording every 12 h of a visual analog scale (VAS) rating in all the patients admitted to the inpatients' ward independently of their disease stage, was activated in 2002. An audit on the clinical charts of patients admitted for the first time in the first semester of 2003 was carried out in order to ascertain the applicability of the procedure and its congruence with patients' clinical status. RESULTS The VAS rating was reported in 211 out of 223 (94.6%) clinical charts. At entry, 60 out of 211 (28.4%) patients presented VAS>or=1, 21 (35%) of whom were not taking any analgesics. The mean VAS score>or=1 was 3.4. No statistically significant difference emerged in the distribution of VAS rating as regards disease extension, presence or absence of bone metastases and performance status. CONCLUSIONS The systematic monitoring of VAS by nurses at a medical oncology inpatients' ward is feasible with a good patient compliance. The reliability of the procedure in terms of guiding the analgesic treatment has yet to be demonstrated.