Advancing the Safety of Acute Pain Management. Boston, Massachusetts: Institute for Healthcare Improvement; 2019. (Available on ihi.org)
Although prescriptions for opioids are on the decline, open questions remain about how to safely and effectively treat acute pain without over-reliance on these drugs.
This report describes the recommendations of an expert panel convened by IHI to examine acute pain management. It specifically and uniquely addresses acute pain management as a patient safety issue, including the overuse of opioids for acute pain.
The report provides health care safety leaders in hospitals, emergency departments (EDs), urgent care clinics, outpatient surgery facilities, and other acute care settings with specific action steps to improve the safety of acute pain management in their organizations, templates for conducting organizational assessments, and a case study illustrating how to move forward on this work.
