Earlier this year, I was fortunate to present a poster at The British Pain Society’s 58th Annual Scientific Meeting. My project was titled ‘Discharge Analgesia Following Elective Surgery: The Importance of Patient Factors’ and was conducted under the supervision of Dr Dev Srivastava, Consultant in Anaesthesia and Pain Medicine at NHS Highland. This conference took place in Newport, South Wales, and was a fantastic and welcoming environment to present my first poster.
Over a period of two weeks in 2024, we identified all patients undergoing a variety of elective, inpatient surgical procedures at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness. We collected data prior to surgery, in order to calculate patients’ ‘complexity scores’, using a scoring system initially created to stratify the complexity of patients with chronic pain, and adapting this for our use in patients experiencing acute post-surgical pain. This takes into account patient factors such as physical conditioning, smoking status, psychiatric health conditions, current opioid analgesia use, educational level and employment, as well as existing chronic pain conditions and sleep comorbidities, which are known to affect the experience of pain.
We measured the number of patients that were prescribed additional analgesia in primary care, during the 4 weeks post-discharge from their procedure, and tried to identify any patient factors that increased the likelihood of this. Patients undergoing orthopaedic surgery and patients using opioid analgesia prior to surgery appeared to be slightly more likely to be prescribed additional analgesia in the 4 weeks post-discharge, although this was not a significant difference. We also found a slight positive correlation between a higher patient complexity score and the likelihood of being prescribed additional analgesia in the 4 weeks post-discharge, although again this was not significant. Further studies with larger patient numbers would be required to better assess whether these differences may be significant.
Whilst it was somewhat nerve wracking to present this project, it was really interesting to discuss my work with other conference delegates, answering their questions and learning more about similar projects being done elsewhere in the UK – all providing lots of inspiration with where to take this research next!
The educational opportunities that this conference provided were wide ranging and engaging. On the first day, I participated in a full day workshop on ultrasound guided neck and shoulder pain management, which involved lots of hands-on practice. On days two and three I attended a broad variety of talks covering the potential neuro-immune basis of fibromyalgia, the ways in which biostatistics can help make use of big data in pain research, experiences of pain in neurodivergent individuals and the link between adolescent dysmenorrhea and the development of later chronic pain. A particular highlight was a plenary talk regarding the history of opioid use in acute pain, which touched on the history of acute pain management, such as the development of the first intravenous patient controlled analgesia device, to the potential future of opioids and non-opioid alternatives.
From other early career doctors to consultants, health psychologists, statisticians and dentists, it was great to be able to network with the huge range of people attending the conference and really gave me an appreciation of the interdisciplinary nature of pain research.
I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Srivastava, for his encouragement and support with this project, Claire Wright and Louise Reid, Acute Pain Nurses at Raigmore Hospital, for their essential help with data collection, and to the School of Medicine, Medical Sciences and Nutrition at Aberdeen for the financial support which helped me attend this conference. The University of Aberdeen was well represented at this conference and it was nice to receive a comment about how research active Aberdeen is!
