Health care professionals' understanding of chronic pain: a grounded theory study

The aim of this qualitative study was to explore the way heath care professional pereceive chronic pain. In-depth interviews with 22 members of the staff at a Swedish hospital were analysed according to grounded theory methodology. Three descriptive categories were grounded in the data: ‘the professional's caring reality’, and ‘the professional's thoughts on ideal care’. These categories were then subsumed under a higher order category which we labelled as ‘professional ambiguity’. All the repondents gave evidence of having ideas about an ideal way of handling pain, largely feflecting a biopsycho-social model. AT the same time, in their way of describing their everyday way of working with these problems, they expressed quite different, biomedical principles. The ambiguity from these contradictory representations is discussed in terms of organizational bases.