Award Date

May 2023

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Occupational Therapy Doctorate

Department

Brain Health

First Committee Member

Donnamarie Krause

Second Committee Member

Jefferson Kinney

Number of Pages

136

Abstract

Interdisciplinary care is the standard for individuals admitted to a burn unit, yet there is a lack of uniform education among different professionals regarding pain management (Kuhlmann & Tallman, 2022). Occupational therapists offer a unique and holistic lens to pain management by using nonpharmacological interventions to reduce patients’ perception of pain (American Burn Association, 2017; Nielson et al., 2022). The purpose of this quality improvement doctoral capstone was to apply this occupational lens in an educational toolkit designed for the interdisciplinary team that addressed nonpharmacological pain management for adults in the burn unit; effectively closing the knowledge gap across disciplines and increasing perceived self-confidence when providing patient care. To this end, an extensive literature review, informal observation of interdisciplinary team members, and a patient caseload informed the resultant toolkit.To determine the effectiveness of this toolkit within the chosen setting, pre-test and post-test surveys were administered to 10 volunteer participants before and after a roundtable presentation. The quantitative results while using descriptive statistics and paired t-test analysis demonstrate an increase in mean scores and statistical significance through the p-values of 0.02, 0.02, 0.002, <0.001, 0.08, and 0.004, respectively. Given these results, it is concluded that this educational toolkit was successful in increasing practitioner confidence with nonpharmacological pain management techniques for patients in the Regions Hospital Burn Unit. Though limitations with sample size, study timing, and geographical location impacted the study, there was still found to be an increase in interdisciplinary confidence regarding the use of nonpharmacological pain management techniques for adults in the burn unit.

Keywords

burn unit; occupational therapy; pain management

Disciplines

Occupational Therapy

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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