Pain Service
Our inpatient acute pain service provides patients who are undergoing surgery with safe and effective pain management. The service is led by a Consultant Anaesthetist and run by Nurses on a day to day basis to provide our patients with good postoperative pain control with minimal side effects to help speed your recovery after surgery. The Acute Pain Service also reviews analgesia regimes for patients on Medical Wards who are experiencing Acute Pain.
We offer an outpatient chronic pain service at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, that operates mainly at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup. We have outpatient services and day case injection lists at Queen Mary’s Hospital but no day case injection lists at Darent Valley Hospital. Currently, we only have one outpatient clinic at Darent Valley Hospital. There is no inpatient chronic pain service.
Our Acute Pain Service
- The Acute Pain Service aims to ensure all patients have access to safe and effective pain management from admission to discharge. These patients can be both surgical and medical.
- To provide specialist pain management advice and clinical support to staff on how best to manage your postoperative pain.
- Provide education and clinical support to doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals to improve their pain management knowledge.
- We use various ways to control postoperative pain ranging from medicine and tablets and injections to using devices to administer analgesia via various routes.
We provide
- Pre- and post- operative pain management advice
- At least once daily nurse led pain management ward rounds, Monday – Friday
- Troubleshooting pain problems
- Devising pain management regimes to control patients admitted with a pain problem including oral analgesics, intramuscular/subcutaneous injections, intravenous patient controlled analgesia and patient controlled epidural analgesia
- Ensuring the patients’ pain management regime is suitable for discharge