Acute postoperative pain management
An unpleasant part of almost every surgical procedure is pain, which can complicate the postoperative period. Therefore, it is necessary to keep that in mind and prevent pain adequately. Even though sensation of pain is subjective and differs in every individual, we can expect a certain intensity of pain characteristic for specific types of procedures. Throught this algorithm you will learn how to approach the management of pain of different intensity.
Review
Acute postoperative pain management algorithm is one of those that concern great number of doctors and patients. Around 800 000 patiens yearly undergo a surgery with an anaesthesiologist present, thus a significant part of population meets with acute postoperative pain. This algorithm chooses different kinds of surgical procedures based on pain intensity and offers practical management options according to actual knowledge in this field. Main focus is on multimodal therapy where combination of various analgesics and analgetic methods are used to enhance their effect while minimising the side effects of individual drugs. The importance of wound infiltration just before the end of surgery is very well emphasized as one of the multimodal approaches to pain management.
Sources
Křikava, I., Kubricht, V., Lejčko, J., Málek, J., Ševčík, P., & Štourač, P. (2022). Doporučený postup - léčba akutní pooperační bolesti. Anesteziologie a intenzivní medicína, 33(2), 111-120. doi: 10.36290/aim.2022.019
Learning targets
A student will learn how to use suitable analgesics for pain treatment.
A student will learn which analgesics combinations are or aren´t suitable.
Key points
When treating higher intensity of pain, concept of multimodal pharmcotherapy is recommended.
For simplification, we can divide surgical procedures into types with expected mild, moderate or severe postoperative pain.
