The acute pain team
Aside from the moral imperative to avert needless suffering from pain, ineffective postoperative pain management may contribute to multiple adverse perioperative outcomes. The primary objective of the modern acute pain service (APS) is to diagnose and treat acute pain as a pathophysiologic process. The APS includes physicians, nurses in the procedural care area and in the units/wards, and a variety of consultant staff critical for the delivery of safe and effective care of patients suffering from acute pain. The modern APS functions across not only multiple inpatient hospital environments, but also at multiple scales of healthcare coordination and delivery. While nominally charged with improving a patient’s pain, this objective is entirely predicated upon the context of optimizing patient functioning while guaranteeing patient safety. This contextualized objective has driven a reexamination of not only the evaluation of a patient’s acute pain, but also measures of APS effi cacy. Future work is necessary to continually optimize the effective and effi cient delivery of acute pain management services in an increasingly complex healthcare system.
