The woman is under treated

Running head: MENTAL HEALTH
Mental health
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

1MENTAL HEALTH
Overview of the case:
During clinical placement, an elderly woman aged 65 years was admitted to the hospital
with worsening symptoms of agitation, aggression and social withdrawal since the last 2 weeks.
Her husband reports that she also injured her right ankle last night while transferring from bed to
the wheel chair. On assessment, the patient is found to be in severe pain. Although she is
continuing with her antipsychotic drugs, however no pain related medications were given. The
woman is undertreated as pain was the main reason for her aggressive behaviour. However, this
remained under-recognized. Brecher and West (2016) argues that dementia patient with poor
pain control manifest their symptoms through challenging behaviours like social withdrawal and
verbal aggression.
Barriers to effective treatment:
The elderly women needed pain management intervention. Although pain is highly
prevalence in dementia patient, this symptom and the opportunity to provide effective treatment
is hampered because of barriers like challenges in identification of pain. This is mainly because
90% of dementia patient develop behavioural symptoms and most clinicians link it to the
underlying disease process. Other barriers to effective pain management includes lack of training
or education, poor use of guidelines on management of pain, workload demands and poor pain
related communication. Use of psychotropic drugs also masks pain symptoms (Greenwich,
2014).
Method to address the barriers
There are many steps to address the above barriers and provide pain control to patients as
early as possible. Firstly, use of observation and pain assessment tools can help nurse to identify