Assessing North Dakota Nurse Practitioners' Knowledge of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network's Treatment Guidelines for Adult Cancer Pain

• Main Author: Schoenberg, Lisa Maire
• Format: Others
• Published: North Dakota State University 2017
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10365/26928

The purpose of this project was to determine if access to the National Comprehensive Cancer Network's guidelines on the treatment of adult cancer related pain increased nurse practitioner knowledge and utilization in practice. The guidelines were provided to nurse practitioners who practiced within an oncology setting in North Dakota to assess whether their knowledge of pain management increased and if they found the guidelines to be a useful tool to have in practice. A pre-intervention questionnaire was sent to the participants to gain demographic information, including, age and gender, type of certification, primary area of practice, number of years practicing as an nurse practitioner, hours spent in clinical practice per week, and the average number of oncology patients seen per week. In addition, the pre-intervention questionnaire evaluated current treatment modalities the participants utilized in treating cancer related pain. After receiving the pre-intervention questionnaires, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network's guidelines were distributed to the participants who agreed to utilize them for the duration of this project. The participants were given the full guidelines, a pocketbook of the guideline's algorithms, and instructions for utilizing the phone application of the guidelines. A post-intervention questionnaire was sent out three months after the guidelines were distributed assessing their impact on nurse practitioner practice. Overall, the participants felt that the guidelines increased their knowledge on treatment modalities for cancer related pain and found them to be a useful resource in practice. From this project we can assume that the evidence based guidelines provided from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network are beneficial for novice and experienced nurse practitioners practicing in oncology.