The Birth of a Pain Management Tool
Bedside Pain Manager was conceived in 1998 by veteran hospice and home health nurse Judi Hunt, RN. During her 20 years in practice, Judi had gathered and carried with her a compendium of pain control charts, package inserts and various workshop notes to assist her in delivering safe, effective pain management to her patients.
This growing collection of documents proved very useful but was increasingly difficult to keep up to date and organized, and several math steps were sometimes required to effectively compare one chart to another.
Judi decided to integrate all this information into a single document and to eliminate the need for some of the calculations. After she and several colleagues field-tested the newly combined document in actual practice with hospice patients, Judi made a few improvements and revisions and had it professionally designed. The inaugural four-page edition of Bedside Pain Manager (BPM) was published in 1999.
BPM was enthusiastically received by other healthcare professionals, and Judi launched Pain Management Resources, LLC to continue developing and publishing BPM. She expanded her team to include assistance from experts in pharmacy, computer programming, graphic arts, and marketing.
As the content of the printed document was updated in 2002, 2004, 2008, and 2011, BPM expanded from four pages to ten.
Jumping Into the Digital Age
With the 2015 edition, Bedside Pain Manager has not only been updated, it is being made available digitally for the first time and offered as an annual online membership. This much-requested new feature makes BPM even more useful and versatile. BPM Online members will be able to access the entire database of information on their computers and also on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones.
The advantages of online and mobile access include real-time updates and the ability to search for specific terms and desired information.
As always, we invite your feedback on BPM and especially the new online edition. We encourage your suggestions for making Bedside Pain Manager even more helpful to our shared commitment to improve our ability to make solid, timely, informed decisions to provide safe and effective pain relief for our patients.