Exploring How Ethnoculturally Diverse Surgical Patients and Families Perceive and Deal with Pain Before Hospital Admissions in Ethiopia: Qualitative Descriptive Study

Background: Pain is one of the major medical and public health challenges in the world, and its prevalence is unaffected by some ‘painful’ pandemics of the past, reflecting the deep-rooted causes of other origins. Surgical conditions accounting for one-third of the global burden of disease are associated with physical pain, either as a symptom or complication. For effective perioperative pain management of culturally diverse patients, it is imperative to understand how patients view and deal with pain. Therefore, this study explored study participants’ pain experience as well as their perception of the causes, consequences, and treatment options of surgical condition-related pain. Methods: With a subjectivist research paradigm, as well as relativist and interpretivist ontological and epistemological underpinnings, a qualitative description study design was used to interview 11 patients with abdominal surgical conditions and 12 family members taking care of those patients in three hospitals. Following inductive coding, thematic analysis was employed, which resulted in four themes. Findings: Patients and their families shared various experiences and perceptions of the meanings, causes, consequences, and treatment options of pain, summarized under four emergent themes: Perception of pain meaning, causes, and consequences; sustenance for pain relief; traditional pain relievers; and conventional pain medicine. Conclusions: This study highlighted that ethnoculturally diverse surgical patients and their families may have unique perceptions of pain and use various treatment approaches at home, which might have implications on perioperative pain management. Therefore, professionals at the participating hospitals and elsewhere with similar contexts should consider these cultural phenomena during surgical pain management.