October 2014
Featured in this insight: Medical & healthcare
Research shows that post-op pain management has improved over the past ten years: A new survey has revealed a decrease in American severe post-operative pain within the last decade.
In 2003, a reported 63% of respondents reported suffering with marked levels of pain within a fortnight of an in-hospital surgical procedure. Eleven years later, in 2014, just 39% had experiences similar.
It has been found that roughly 45 million in-patient operations are carried out every year. Between 1998 and 2002 a survey was executed to poll how many patients experienced moderate to severe pain within a fortnight of being discharged from hospital, after surgery. The results showed that 63% of 129 patients had experienced moderate to severe levels of pain.
Following on from this, the team conducted a post-operative survey to gage whether the patients experience of pain had improved. They surveyed a sample of 400 inpatients.
The 400 patients were asked to describe how satisfied they were with the pain treatment which they received. Severity was also requested both upon discharge and then followed up one, two and three weeks following. They were asked to rank their severity of pain from none to extreme. Little change in outcomes were discovered by the research team, when the two-mark surveys were compared from both 2003 and 2014, as just over one fifth in each survey reported no pain post-op.
Patient satisfaction with pain management, which they were offered, stands reasonably similar across both the 2003 and 2014 surveys. In 2003, 83% reported to be either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” and similarly 87% in 2014.
Drastic changes occurred two weeks post-op. The number of patients, who claimed to be in moderate to extreme pain, fell from approximately 6 in 10 in 2003 to 4 in 10 in 2014.
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