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In Pain Management, Innovation is Key

Aug 31, 2023

At Shriners Children’s Canada, our healthcare professionals are guided by the hospital’s seven main values in their daily work life – Excellence, Innovation, Integrity, Stewardship, Respect, Teamwork and Commitment. Each month, the hospital has been highlighting a different value, and in April we celebrated innovation with a special innovation fair. Many departments were involved and covered a variety of subjects with 26 booths.

In the video below, we introduce you to different innovative pain management projects implemented at Shriners Children’s Canada. Our care team first tackled postoperative pediatric pain management. The goal is to reduce pain levels quickly and effectively by preventing pain and using as few opioids as possible, especially given the opioid crisis in North America.

Our projects in the acute pain service have enabled us not only to reduce the level of pain in our patients by using as few opiates as possible, but also to work interdisciplinary to:

  • Reduce complications.
  • Facilitate recovery.
  • Minimize the use of resources.
  • Reduce length of stay.
  • Enhance patient experience and family satisfaction.

Watch our professionals explain some of their pain management projects, which are now up and running at the hospital.

Pain Management - Innovation

At Shriners Hospitals for Children - Canada, pain management is crucial. This is why our healthcare professionals are always in search of new ways to either eliminate, reduce or mange pain whatever the type of medical intervention.
View Transcript

Kaleb, Montreal, Quebec:

Hello, everybody. Welcome to my hospital.

Text layover:

We provide orthopedic care to children aged 0 to 21. Commonly treated conditions include:

  • Clubfoot
  • Limb deficiencies/discrepancies
  • Hip disorders
  • Scoliosis (curvature of the spine)
  • Osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease)

Our goal is to help each child become as healthy and independent as possible. To achieve this, we provide a range of services including surgeries, physical, occupational and recreation therapies, and fittings for braces and artificial limbs.

Speaker 2:

Hi, I'm Rosa Alicia Paradelo. I'm a Clinical Nurse Specialist in postoperative care and acute pain management with Dr. [inaudible], who's the Director of Acute Pain Management here at the Shriners Hospitals for Children - Canada. We have created two posters that resume a bit of our projects within 10 years. The first project was a little bit about the diet that we implemented for posterior spinal fusions, which decreased nausea, vomiting, and constipation. The second project was to put medication around the clock and have staff and families teaching to evaluate pain. So that decreased a lot of the pain and especially the needs for opioids. Then we also had the pectus population that undergoes a Nuss procedure, and we have implemented cryoablation with an ERAS (enhanced recovery after surgery) protocol, which reduces the length of stay and pain control, of course, from seven days to 24 hours. And the fourth project is implementing elastomeric pumps for patients having knee surgery. This pump covers three days of surgery, reduces the inflammation process, and it reduces the amount of opioids that they need throughout those three days and even further on.

Speaker 3:

ACLs hurt because they actually drill a big hole through the bone to anchor a new ligament. So it's actually quite painful for the first two to three days. So we're decreasing opioid use. We're also decreasing the amount of opioids available in the community, which is usually leftover opioids are one of the biggest source of opioid misuse that happens in North America.

Speaker 2:

We also provide the families with an informative pamphlet that includes access to a video on how to remove a nerve block catheter. Thank you.

Text layover:

Contributors:

Rosa Alicia Paradelo
Dr. Christelle Poulin Harnois

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