When cancer pain breaks through, what can you do?

Breakthrough pain in cancer patients can be very difficult to manage, primarily because of its heterogeneous and fleeting nature, so careful assessment is imperative to finding an adequate treatment regimen. Only a paucity of good research exists to support current interventions, and additional viable options need to be discovered. Oncology nurses must play an integral role in improving the treatment of breakthrough pain-one patient, one in-service for colleagues, and one clinical research study at a time.

Development of the CASH assessment tool to address existential concerns in patients with serious illness.

INTRODUCTION: Existential suffering in patients with serious illness significantly impacts quality of life, yet it remains a challenge to define, assess, and manage adequately. Improving upon understanding and practice in the existential domain is a topic of interest for palliative care providers. METHODS: As a quality improvement project, our palliative care team created an existential assessment tool utilizing a dialogue-oriented approach with four questions designed to identify sources of existential distress as well as strengths and challenges in coping with this distress. The tool utilized the mnemonic CASH, with each letter representing the core objective of the question. Providers who requested the palliative care consult were asked to evaluate the CASH assessment. On completion of the project, palliative care consultants evaluated the appropriateness of the CASH assessment tool. RESULTS: Patient responses to the CASH questions were insightful and reflected their beliefs, priorities, and concerns. Eight of nine providers found that the assessment enabled understanding of their patient. Seven noted a positive impact on their practice, and five reported an improvement in patient care after the assessment. The palliative care consultants who used the tool enjoyed using it, and half of them suggested changes to patient care based on their assessment. The most common reasons for not using the CASH assessment were inappropriateness to the consult, lack of perceived patient/caregiver receptiveness, or consultation service too busy. CONCLUSION: Our quality improvement project demonstrated that the CASH assessment tool is useful in ascertaining existential concerns of patients with serious illness. It enhances patient care by the primary team as well as the palliative care team. As a brief set of questions with an easy-to-remember mnemonic, the CASH assessment tool is feasible for a busy palliative consult service. Furthermore, the positive results of this project merit more rigorous evaluation of the CASH assessment tool in the future.

Oral ketamine for sickle cell crisis pain refractory to opioids.

There is literature demonstrating that the N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist ketamine has analgesic properties that can be used as an adjuvant to opiates for pain relief in multiple various conditions and pain states. However, there is a lack of published information on ketamine used in persons with sickle cell disease in acute pain crises. The Virginia Commonwealth University Palliative Care team was consulted on a 38-year-old African American female with sickle cell thalassemia in severe acute pain crisis overlying chronic pain related to her disease. Pain control was unable to be achieved with escalating doses of opiates and other adjuvant medications. The patient responded well to an intravenous test dose of ketamine and was subsequently placed on an oral regimen of ketamine in addition to opiates. In the 24-hour period following ketamine initiation, the patient's pain was able to be controlled on decreased amounts of opiates. She was eventually transitioned to an oral opiate and ketamine regimen, which allowed her to be discharged home with pain levels close to her baseline and the ability to function and perform all activities of daily living.