This study aimed to explore and compare the knowledge structure of pain management nursing research, between Korea and other countries, applying a text network analysis.

321 Korean and 6,685 international study abstracts of pain management, published from 2004 to 2017, were collected. Keywords and meaningful morphemes from the abstracts were analyzed and refined, and their co-occurrence matrix was generated. Two networks of 140 and 424 keywords, respectively, of domestic and international studies were analyzed using NetMiner 4.3 software for degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, and eigenvector community analysis.

In both Korean and international studies, the most important, core-keywords were “pain,” “patient,” “pain management,” “registered nurses,” “care,” “cancer,” “need,” “analgesia,” “assessment,” and “surgery.” While some keywords like “education,” “knowledge,” and “patient-controlled analgesia” found to be important in Korean studies; “treatment,” “hospice palliative care,” and “children” were critical keywords in international studies. Three common sub-topic groups found in Korean and international studies were “pain and accompanying symptoms,” “target groups of pain management,” and “RNs’ performance of pain management.” It is only in recent years (2016~17), that keywords such as “performance,” “attitude,” “depression,” and “sleep” have become more important in Korean studies than, while keywords such as “assessment,” “intervention,” “analgesia,” and “chronic pain” have become important in international studies.

It is suggested that Korean pain-management researchers should expand their concerns to children and adolescents, the elderly, patients with chronic pain, patients in diverse healthcare settings, and patients’ use of opioid analgesia. Moreover, researchers need to approach pain-management with a quality of life perspective rather than a mere focus on individual symptoms.

This study attempts to compare the degree of pain when different methods of blood sugar test are used between a DM patient group and a healthy group.

A sample is composed of 56 DM patients and 57 their family who are admitted in a ward of C university hospital in Gwangju. Data were collected from July, 2001 to December, 2001. The blood sugar tests are administered four different ways. The degree of pain is measured twice with a visual analog scale in a week interval.

The differences in the degree of pain according to methods of blood sugar test were not found between the DM patient group and the healthy group in both measures. The only use of a 27G needle method was shown to cause highest level of pain in comparison with the rest of methods in the first measure of the DM patient group and in both the measures of the healthy group.

The study results indicate that the method using lanceter is more recommendable than method of using a 27G needle. Furthermore, the ice therapy and EMLA cream is likely to be more effective on the pain relief in the healthy group than the DM patient group.

The purpose of this methodological study was to examine the reliability and validity of a translated Korean version of the Critical Care Pain Observation Tool (CPOT) developed for assessment of pain in critically ill nonverbal patients.

A cross-sectional study design was used. Data were collected from a convenience sample of 202 critically ill patients admitted to a university hospital. Upon establishment of content and translation equivalence between the English and Korean version of CPOT, psychometric properties were evaluated.

The interrater reliability was found to be acceptable with the weighted kappa coefficients of .81-.88. Significant high correlations between the CPOT and the Checklist of Nonverbal Pain Indicators were found indicating good concurrent validity (r=.72-.83, p<.001). Data showed the area under the ROC curve of 0.86 with a cut-off point of 1, which resulted in 76.9% sensitivity and 88.6% specificity. The mean score of CPOT during suctioning was significantly different from that of before (t=-14.16, p<.001) or 20 minutes after suctioning (t=16.31, p<.001).

Results of this study suggest that the CPOT can be used as a reliable and valid measure to assess pain in critically ill nonverbal patients.