Despite well-publicized guidelines, acute pain remains a significant problem for medical inpatients, including veterans. Registered nurse staff plays a key role in inpatient pain management: they assess pain, coordinate and administer pain medication and evaluate its effectiveness. The nursing shortage has prompted study of nurse staffing and nurse education as key structures in those outcomes defined as sensitive to nursing, including pain management. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which nurse staffing and nurse education predict five specific pain management outcomes. A cross-sectional design was used to examine the effects of nurse staffing defined as hours per patient day (hppd), nursing-specific level of education, patient and pain characteristics on patient assessment of overall satisfaction with pain management, with nurse treatment of pain, wait time for pain medication, with nurse communication about the importance of pain treatment and with nurse communication about the importance of reporting pain. Forward, stepwise and backward regression analyses were used to test the relationships proposed by the conceptual model. Study results revealed that pain relief (β=-.309, p=0.0001), patient age (β=.247, p=0.006) and RN education (β=.200, p=0.025) demonstrated small but significant predictive effects on overall satisfaction with pain management. Pain relief (β=-.227, p=0.013) demonstrated a small but significant predictive effect on satisfaction with nurse treatment pain, and pain relief (β=-.183, p=0.043) and total hppd (β=.186, p=0.040) demonstrated weak but significant predictive effects on nurse communication about the importance of reporting pain. The magnitudes of the relationships were small; however, they were in the hypothesized directions, supporting the model's propositions. The findings from the study warrant further examination of the influence of nurse staffing and nurse education on pain management outcomes.