Nursing students hope video will prevent opioid misuse

In health care, nurses are on the front line. With eyes on opioid overdoses, addiction and death, who better to treat overtreatment with opioids than nurses, who assess and manage patients’ pain?

Four students enrolled in the UNMC College of Nursing doctor of nursing practice program (DNP) were armed with scripts, a video camera and clapperboard to make a video with a game-based learning module to teach the process of assessing pain.

In a simulated hospital room in the Center for Nursing Science, Victoria Tran, Abigail Simende, Travis Thuringer and Kaitlin Maasdam, with support from their professor, spent several hours shooting scene after scene. Amy Horejsi acted as the “patient” with broken ribs and other injuries from a car accident.

Nursing professor Joyce Black, Ph.D., said the video will be used to help educate undergraduate nursing students and potentially practicing nurses, on pain assessment and management. The project is part of DNP coursework, which requires students to identify and research a system-wide health care problem, then uses research evidence to suggest a solution on how to introduce change into the system.

In her role as the “patient’s” nurse, Maasdam’s job was to determine what her patient’s pain level was through a variety of questions and non-verbal cues. When Maasdam first asked Horejsi what her pain level was from one to 10 with 10 being the worst, Horejsi said, “11.”

“A lot of time as nurses, it’s up to us to assess pain,” Maasdam said. “Pain is what the patient says, but part of our job is to make pain assessment objective so we can do our job. We also want patients to leave the hospital knowing the risks of using pain medications. It’s on us as nurses to educate patients.”

Maasdam gave the patient more information about the pain scale and asked a series of other questions, which ultimately helped her get a more realistic pain assessment.

Dr. Black said the video could help new nurses who aren’t as experienced in rating pain and knowing how to coach patients with the pain scale as well as help patients who’ve never experienced a high level of pain give an accurate assessment.

Maasdam is a nurse at the Omaha VA Medical Center, and Horejsi, Tran, Simende and Thuringer are nurses at Nebraska Medicine. When they graduate, they will be nurse practitioners.

Students received support for the project from the e-learning lab.