Objectives
Prior work on postoperative pain trajectories have examined pain score changes over time using daily averages of pain scores. However, little is known about the time required until patients consistently report minimal postoperative pain.
Materials and Methods
We conducted a retrospective cohort study of surgical case data from 7,293 adult patients to examine the impact of age, gender, and the type of surgery on the time to sustained postoperative pain relief (SuPPR). We defined SuPPR as the time required until a patient reports the first of multiple (2, 3, 4, or 5 sequential measurements; e.g., SuPPR-2, SuPPR-3, etc.), uninterrupted, mild pain scores (≤4/10).
Results
Overall, SuPPR times ranged from 3 min for SuPPR-2 and 9 min for SuPPR-5 to 160.1 h for SuPPR-2 and 183.1 h for SuPPR-5. For the SuPPR-2 outcome, the median time to event was 10.9 h (interquartile range [IQR], 3–26.1 h) after surgery. For the SuPPR-5 outcomes, the median time to event was 31.5 h (IQR, 17.8–54.2 h) after surgery. The peak median difference between two sequential SuPPR definitions was between SuPPR-3 and SuPPR-2 at 9 h, with subsequent decreases to 6.5 h between SuPPR-4 and SuPPR-3, and 5.2 h between SuPPR-5 and SuPPR-4. There were statistically different differences across SuPPR 2 through 5 definitions by age, gender, and type of surgery.
Discussion
Although additional analyses are necessary, SuPPR may represent a novel method for evaluating acute pain service performance.