Three-year Hospital-wide Pain Management System Implementation at a Tertiary Medical Center: Pain Prevalence Analysis

Overview

Journal PLoS One

Specialties General Medicine
Science

Date 2023 Apr 13

PMID 37053144

Authors

Ming-Chuan Chen

Te-Feng Yeh

Chih-Cheng Wu

Yan-Ru Wang

Chieh-Liang Wu

Ruei-Ling Chen

Ching-Hui Shen

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

We developed a pain management system over a 3-year period. In this project, "Towards a pain-free hospital", we combined evidence-based medicine and medical expertise to develop a series of policies. The intervention mainly included the development of standard procedures for inpatient pain management, the implementation of hospital-wide pain medicine education and training, the establishment of a dashboard system to track pain status, and regular audits and feedback. This study aimed to gain an understanding of the changes in the prevalence of pain in inpatients under the care of the pain management system. The subjects of the survey are inpatients over 20 years old, and who had been hospitalized in the general ward for at least 3 days. The patients would be excluded if they were unable to respond to the questions. We randomly selected eligible patients in the general ward. Our trained interviewers visited inpatients to complete the questionnaires designed by our pain care specialists. A total of 3,094 inpatients completed the survey from 2018 to 2020. During the three-year period, the prevalence of pain was 69.5% (2018) (reference), 63.3% (2019) (OR:0.768, p<0.01), and 60.1% (2020) (OR:0.662, p <0.001). The prevalence rates of pain in patients undergoing surgery during the 3-year period were 81.4% (2018), 74.3% (2019), and 68.8% (2020), respectively. As for care-related causes of pain, injection, change in position/chest percussion, and rehabilitation showed a decreasing trend over the 3-year period of study. Our pain management system provided immediate professional pain management, and achieved a good result in the management of acute moderate to severe pain, especially perioperative pain. Studies on pain prevalence and Pain-Free Hospitals are scarce in Asia. With the aid of the policies based on evidence-based medicine and the dashboard information system, from 2018 to 2020, the prevalence of pain has decreased year by year.

Citing Articles

Knowledge, attitudes and practices of pain management among Taiwanese physicians in a reformed 2-year postgraduate training programme: a cross-sectional questionnaire survey.

Chen J, Ho S, Yeh C, Feng C, Hsu C, Lin T Ann Med. 2025; 57(1):2466671.

PMID: 39985191 PMC: 11849015. DOI: 10.1080/07853890.2025.2466671.

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