Pain Services

Acute Pain Service

What do we do?

The Acute Pain Service is a inpatient consulting service which assists in the management of difficult-to-manage pain, end-of-life-pain, withdrawal symptoms and weaning from opiates, managing patient/nurse controlled anesthesia (PCA/NCA), and epidural anesthesia. There is also a Chronic Pain Management Program which is an outpatient program that features interdisciplinary treatment of children and adolescents who have chronic pain.

What is acute pain?

Pain is “an unpleasant sensory and or emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage. (IASP) Acute pain is pain which is of short duration, usually less than one week. It stems from some ongoing pathology, such as tissue damage or pain after having surgery, trauma or sickle cell crisis. Tissue damage causes pain receptors to be activated. These pain receptors transmit signals through the spinal cord to the brain to be processed and evaluated with the end result of pain. There are psychosocial, cultural, developmental and environmental aspects to acute pain, as well as the obvious physiologic aspects.

Who are we?

We are a team of eight pediatric anesthesiologists with a special interest in pain and three certified nurse practitioners.