In recognition of National Advance Care Planning Week, 20-26 March 2023, care providers from across Australia have shared their first-hand experiences with the realities of caring for residents in pain, and the critical importance of pain assessment and management in enhancing people’s quality of life.
National Advance Care Planning Week has challenged those to discuss what living well means to them, and to consider who they would want to speak for them if they could no longer communicate or make their own health care decisions.
Care provider and Registered Nurse Alvin Carlos has worked alongside a team of nurses and doctors to provide care for 102 residents at the RAAFA Alice Ross-King Care Centre in Bull Creek, Western Australia.
Carlos said that his work includes key challenges as residents in his care suffer a variety of health issues, with around 90 percent experiencing pain.
“Effective pain assessment is one of the key challenges. Some of our residents don’t really complain about it but are in fact experiencing pain most of the time,” said Carlos.
“It could be that they don’t want to show they are in pain, or it could be masked by pain relief medication. Some of them are physically and cognitively declining and may not be able to tell us about their pain level.”
Accurate pain assessment does not only have important implications for aged care residents’ treatment outcomes and quality of life, but also for giving their loved ones peace of mind.
To achieve this, the Alice Ross-King Care Centre introduced a digital pain assessment tool for both verbal and non-verbal residents with dementia or cognitive impairments. Residents’ pain can now be assessed quickly and objectively, and pain assessment data helps inform care and pain management plans, including appropriate pain relief.
The tool used by the centre, PainChek, is a point-of-care pain assessment solution that enables care teams to quickly identify when someone is in pain, regardless of whether or not they can self-report, and quantify the severity of that pain to guide appropriate pain relief and treatment. PainChek’s smartphone-based app uses the device’s camera and AI to identify micro-facial expressions indicative of pain.
PainChek CEO and Managing Director, Philip Daffas agreed that pain is a deeply personal and multifaceted experience.
“It affects people in different ways. Across all care settings, there are multiple people involved in the process of managing a person’s pain,” said Daffas.
“By listening to the voices of these people, we can highlight the need for a more holistic approach to pain management,” he says, “and foster an environment where the pain is better understood, better identified, and ultimately, better managed.”
With more than two million pain assessments completed globally using PainChek, clinicians are convinced of the benefits of digital pain assessment.
Francesca Glamorgan, a carer working at St Mary’s Villa Residential Aged Care in Concord, New South Wales, said that the majority of residents she has worked with suffer pain of some sort.
“PainChek is something we use all day, every day. Every time we interact with someone, we check for the signs of pain: if they’ve stopped eating, if they’ve stopped sleeping, if they’re more agitated than usual. It truly influences everything.”
The majority of residents in the facilities overseen by Larissa McIntyre, Nurse Practitioner and Head of Clinical Services Residential Aged Care in Sydney, are living with dementia or life-limiting illnesses, and for many, this means dealing with chronic pain. Although completely eliminating pain for these residents may not always be possible, ensuring comfort and dignity is paramount.
“We need to get it right the first time, because we don’t get a second chance. Providing that excellence in care as people are dying and supporting their families is critical,” said McIntyre.
Globally, PainChek has attained regulatory clearance as a medical device in Australia, Canada, the European Union, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom, with FDA review in the United States currently in progress.
