BACKGROUND Pain along with the tools to assess the types, severity and treatment have been extensively studied over the last few decades, and guidelines formulated. However, assessment of pain services have only recently gained importance, to prevent improper pain management. There is a current drive to improve the state of pain management in India. Considering the relative lack of available literature, this study is aimed to provide an insight into the quality of acute pain services (APS) at our health centre. Primarily looking at outcomes, measuring efficiency, safety and timeliness of the APS, by identifying areas requiring improvement. METHODS Standards for the study were selected from the Royal College of Anaesthetists (RCoA) recipe book for acute pain services. Data was collected over a six months period. The study included all patients under the care of the institutional Acute Pain Service (APS). Inference was made with regard to the standards achieved. RESULTS An average of 700 patients per month, with 3-10 days care under the acute pain services, were assessed. Our team met 6 of the 11 standards laid out; 3 standards were not met but deemed acceptable, and 2 standards were found to require improvement. 83% (n=3901) were deemed to have had adequate analgesia. 88% of patient days were GOOD (only pain scores of 0-3), 9% BORDERLINE (incidences of isolated high pain scores) and 3% POOR (incidences of consequently high pain score) pain control. CONCLUSIONS This study identified a number of ways in which hospitals could improve their acute pain services. Continual development in following standardised guidelines, protocols, arrangement of ongoing training and education of pain team are of paramount importance, for the efficacy of the pain services. These were highlighted and upgraded. These simple measures can be recommended to be implemented for improvement of the acute pain management services in any hospital in India.