Table 9.
Theme: Clarity About Opiate Dosage
| Sub-theme(s) | Phase 1: focus groups |
Phase 2: recommendations |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AA | White | AA | White | |
| (A) Lack of clarity about medication and medication regimen administration | “I could not understand why the medical field, they know a person is dying, yet they coming up with some kind of medication that they wanna' put in her mouth you know. So I told the head nurse, I said, ‘Well, why would you guys give here this medication and she's dying?’ She had stopped talking, she had stopped eating, all her body function was, you know, deteriorating okay, and this is what they told me, and I didn't like it at all. They told me that the medication that they was giving here was to ease her pain. I said, ‘she can't fell no pain. She's dying you know, and that's the problem. You know, that really got to me.’ ” “but that Tuesday, the nurse called in sick and they got a temporary nurse, and she gave him too much medicine ‘cause he told me that he was in la-la land. And then his daughter called and he told his daughter and his daughter called and got on the administrator of hospice and they came down and they apologized and that nurse that gave him too much medicine, they made her check on him every five minutes.” |
“The pain had gotten pretty bad with that pancreatic cancer, and the nurses and the medicine bottle told us how much to give, and they also specified, ‘just give this’ but they would come in to check on him, they would say, ‘well, you can give him more.’ We always got confused. Can we give him more, or do we have to follow what's on the bottle? And that was always an issue, even until the end, we never knew what the guidelines were on that.” “The doctor [would not give her pain medicine]; he was worried, that she was gonna’ get addicted, dependent, that's dangerous, You know, you have to tell the doctor, ‘look, the pain … give her the pain medicine … She's 96 years old … Please.’ ” |
X | (1) Explain what each medication is for in simple, easy to understand terms, especially the administration of morphine and its dosing. |