Postoperative Pain After Implementation of Standardized Pain Therapy Management in Orthopaedic Patients

A multimodal standardized pain management was implemented at the Schulthess Clinic in 2002, followed by the gradual introduction of a standardized ultrasound-guided perioperative regional anaesthesia program. Along with these measures, an improved preoperative screening process for patients at risk of increased post-operative pain has been installed and an improved individual pain assessment in the perioperative period has been introduced. This allowed for the creation of pain trajectories, which the pain team started to use to identify gaps in the management of different patient groups. An example of a trajectory group is shown in Figure 1. These pain trajectories have not yet been evaluated for the overall implementation cycle of the multimodal standardized pain management in order to further improve postoperative care especially for patients with a history of chronic pain and those prone to opioid overconsumption.We hypothesise that pain trajectories have changed significantly over the study period as standardised pain management has been implemented. We also hypothesise that patients with chronic pain and increased opioid consumption will have different pain trajectories compared to all other patients. However, we believe that the pain trajectories for different orthopaedic surgeries do not show much variation.