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| Aseni Ratanayake Clinical Nurse Specialist, Regional Pain Management Service, Capital & Coast DHB, Wellington, NZ
Clinical Focus: Frequent Presenters to Emergency Department with Chronic Pain
This presentation quantifies the Clinical Challenge of the “chronic pain patient” who frequently attends ED for an acute exacerbation of their chronic pain.
Current practice in ED is for each visit to be treated as a new presentation often resulting in unnecessary inpatient admission, with associated increased cost. Also at times opiate medication is sought by the patient or given inappropriately by the staff as a response to the patient’s distress induced mood and pain.
To address these problems - frequently presenting patients at CCDHB Wellington Hospital ED are now identified by ED staff and referred to the Chronic Pain Nurse Specialist. The identified patients are then referred through the Chronic Pain Nurse Specialist to the Chronic Pain Multidisciplinary Team for an individual pain management programme as well as followed up by the Chronic Pain Nurse Specialist.
To assess the efficacy of this system we collected data to identify whether the rate of ED presentations for this group of patients would reduce. This presentation describes the methodology, analysis, and results, of the change in the number of ED presentations by “frequent presenters with a chronic pain condition”, after attending an individual pain management programme and follow up with the Chronic Pain Nurse Specialist.
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