A Scoping Review of Nursing's Contribution to the Management of Patients with Pain and Opioid Misuse.
Janet H Van Cleave, Staja Q Booker, Keesha Powell-Roach and 2 others
PMID 33414010WHAT IT FOUND
Nurses have shaped the literature on pain and opioid misuse across research, practice, policy, and education, but most work focuses on prescribed opioids.
There is little evidence on illicit synthetic opioids or on how much nurses actually contributed to each publication.
Key findings
01The review identified 108 publications where nurses were lead authors, co-authors, or collaborators, with research comprising half of these works.
02The literature focused mainly on prescribed opioids and did not capture a large body of work on the abuse of illicit synthetic opioids.
03The authors could not quantify the explicit role or degree of nurses’ contribution in each publication or study.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The review only included English-language publications with accessible full texts. It focused on prescribed opioids and missed much of the literature on illicit synthetic opioids. The authors did not assess the quality of the included studies. They could not determine how much each nurse actually contributed to the publications included.
Declared interests
The study was supported by the National Institute of Nursing Research and other federal institutions. No commercial conflicts of interest were declared in the text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret this review as evidence that specific nursing interventions improve patient outcomes. It maps what has been written, not what works, and it did not assess the quality of the studies it included.