Introduction:

Pain treatment and relief is a human right. Despite the development of palliative care, it is common to hear cancer patients complain about non-controlled pain. Nursing professionals are one of the main elements in the multidisciplinary care of pain, and their caring work should be based on respect for ethical principles.

Objective:

Present some ethical considerations about the care of patients with cancer pain.

Methods:

A systematic bibliographic review was conducted aimed at a critical reflexive analysis of the content of documents, PhD theses, original papers and review materials published from 2010 to 2019 in Spanish, Portuguese and English. The search was carried out in the databases SciELO and Google Scholar from January to March 2019, using the key words nursing ethics, nursing care, cancer pain, pain management, bioethics, oncology nursing. Upon identification of pre-selected studies, their titles, abstracts and key words were read to determine their relevance to the study.

Conclusions:

The care of patients with cancer pain has a high ethical connotation. Professional competence, ethical and moral principles, collaboration in multidisciplinary teams and the involvement of the family are all indissolubly linked. It was found that communication plays a crucial role in the care of patients, and that poor knowledge about pain treatment is a breach of ethical principles.

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