Student nurses’ attitudes to pain relieving drugs

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal survey of 217 student nurses undertaken during their common foundation programme (CFP), which comprises the first 18 months of the course. The study explored changes during the CFP in students’ perceptions of the risk of addiction and their attitudes towards analgesics. The results revealed that although the students had a more accurate view of the risk of addiction by the end of the CFP there was still an exaggerated fear of the risk of addiction in over half the students. Follow-up interviews with 14 students also indicated that students displayed a more general wariness in relation to the use of analgesics.