What has been lacking is sensitivity to the issue and determination to solve it. Now accreditation agencies have joined the battle against pain and are providing strong motivation for health care institutions to do so as well. No segment of these institutions will be exempt from these requirements. The patient's right to pain management is respected and supported. The organization plans, supports, and coordinates activities and resources to assure the pain of all individuals is recognized and addressed appropriately.
Pain is always subjective.
There is usually no way to distinguish their experience from that due to tissue damage if we take the subjective report. If they regard their experience as pain and if they report it in the same ways as pain caused by tissue damage, it should be accepted as pain. Nonetheless, subjective estimation presents particular challenges for a geriatric population that has a high prevalence of aphasia or dementing illnesses, which may inhibit patients' ability to communicate or quantify pain using verbal, numerical or visual analogue scales. In these situations, family members may be the best sources of information about patients' pain. In other situations, even for patients who are cognitively and communicatively intact, family caregivers may feel that they can better estimate patients' pain than patients themselves.