Date of Award

Fall 11-27-2020

Document Type

Scholarly Project

Degree Name

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP)

Department

Nursing

First Advisor

Kathleen Farrell, DNSc, RN

Second Advisor

Chet McCauley, DNP, RN, ACNS-BC

Abstract

The opioid crisis continues to be a public health concern. Traditionally, an opioid-centric approach treats postoperative pain.

The following PICOT question guided this project: Will initiating a multimodal analgesic virtual reality quality improvement program (I) compared to current practice (C) decrease opioid requirements (O) in robotic hysterectomy patients (P) during the postoperative period (T)? Several articles promote non-opioid analgesia and non-pharmacological interventions, such as multimodal analgesia and virtual reality (VR) for pain management.

This project reviewed pre- and post-implementation data after implementing new evidence-based multimodal analgesia and VR protocols. The project captured a total of 64 patients in the pre-implementation group. A total of 22 patients received both multimodal analgesia and VR in the post-implementation group.

There was no statistically significant difference in total opioid consumption converted as morphine milligram equivalents (MME) between the pre-implementation and post-implementation groups. However, there was a statistically significant difference in multimodal analgesia administered in Pre-op between the pre-implementation and post-implementation groups.

In conclusion, the execution of the multimodal analgesic VR program allowed for nursing adoption of novel evidence-based practices (EBP) and promoted the use of non-opioid and non-pharmacological interventions. Although the combination of multimodal analgesia and VR did not reduce opioid consumption, the practice of incorporating multimodal analgesia as a standard workflow improved.

Comments

Scholarly project submitted to the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Nursing Practice.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Share

COinS