title: Attitudes towards pain management in hospitalized cancer patients and their influencing factors.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To investigate patients' attitudes towards cancer pain management and analyze the factors influencing these attitudes.
  
  
  METHODS
  The self-developed Demographic and Disease-Related Information Questionnaires, Pain Management Barriers Questionnaire-Taiwan form (BQT), and Pain Knowledge Questionnaire were administered to 363 pairs of hospitalized cancer patients and their caregivers from the oncology departments of 7 hospitals in Beijing, China.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The average patient score for attitudes towards pain management was 2.96±0.49. The dimension scores indicated good attitudes in three areas (scores <2.5), "Desire to be good" (2.22±1.04), "Fatalism" (2.08±0.81) and "Religious fatalism" (1.86±1.00), and poor attitudes in six areas (scores ≥2.5), "Tolerance" (3.83±0.96), "Use of analgesics as needed (p.r.n.)" (3.73±1.01), "Addiction" (3.44±1.05), "Disease progression" (3.28±1.26), "Distraction of physicians" (3.16±1.07) and "Side effects" (2.99±0.68). Two factors were entered into the regression equation: the caregivers' attitudes towards cancer pain management and the patients' pain knowledge. These two factors explained 23.2% of the total variance in the patients' average scores for their attitudes towards cancer pain management.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The patients' attitudes towards cancer pain management were poor and could be influenced by the caregivers' attitudes and the patients' pain knowledge, and thus need to be improved.
authors.affiliation: Department of Fundamental Nursing, Peking University School of Nursing, Beijing 100191, China.
authors.forename: Fangli
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Lou
authors.affiliation: Department of Fundamental Nursing, Peking University School of Nursing, Beijing 100191, China.
authors.forename: Shaomei
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Shang
keywords: Cancer patients; attitudes towards cancer pain management; cancer pain