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

## TL;DR

This study explores how diverse surgical patients and their families in Ethiopia understand and manage pain before hospital admission, revealing cultural influences on pain perception and treatment.

## Contribution

The study provides novel insights into ethnocultural perspectives on surgical pain in Ethiopia, emphasizing the importance of cultural considerations in pain management.

## Key findings

- Patients and families perceive pain through culturally shaped meanings, causes, and consequences.
- Traditional and conventional methods are used for pain relief, influencing perioperative care.
- Cultural practices and beliefs impact how pain is managed before hospital admission.

## Abstract

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.