Attitudes towards pain management in hospitalized cancer patients and their influencing factors

Objective: To investigate patients' attitudes towards cancer pain management and analyze the factors influencing these attitudes. Methods: The self-developed Demographic and Disease-Related Information Questionnaires, Pain Management Barriers Questionnaire-Taiwan form (BQT), and Pain Knowledge Questionnaire were administered to 363 pairs of hospitalized cancer patients and their caregivers from the oncology departments of 7 hospitals in Beijing, China. Results: The average patient score for attitudes towards pain management was 2.96 +/- 0.49. The dimension scores indicated good attitudes in three areas (scores < 2.5), "Desire to be good" (2.22 +/- 1.04), "Fatalism" (2.08 +/- 0.81) and "Religious fatalism" (1.86 +/- 1.00), and poor attitudes in six areas (scores >= 2.5), "Tolerance" (3.83 +/- 0.96), "Use of analgesics as needed (p.r.n.)" (3.73 +/- 1.01), "Addiction" (3.44 +/- 1.05), "Disease progression" (3.28 +/- 1.26), "Distraction of physicians" (3.16 +/- 1.07) and "Side effects" (2.99 +/- 0.68). Two factors were entered into the regression equation: the caregivers' attitudes towards cancer pain management and the patients' pain knowledge. These two factors explained 23.2% of the total variance in the patients' average scores for their attitudes towards cancer pain management. Conclusions: The patients' attitudes towards cancer pain management were poor and could be influenced by the caregivers' attitudes and the patients' pain knowledge, and thus need to be improved.