Introduction: Moderate to severe postoperative pain is still a problem in outpatient surgery, since it causes patient flow problems and delays the discharge of patients, being one of the major causes of re-hospitalization and hence a relevant quality indicator of these Units. The use of home invasive analgesic techniques, in all their regimes, can be effective for the management of postoperative pain in these surgical procedures and allow them to be included in outpatient surgery programs. Objectives: The aim of our study was to determine the feasibility and safety of the use of elastomeric continuous perfusion pumps for the administration of home continuous endovenous analgesia, as well as to assess analgesic effectiveness and degree of satisfaction of patients undergoing outpatient hemorrhoidectomy. Material and methods: We conducted a simple prospective study in 61 patients. After the surgical procedure was performed under multimodal analgesia, an elastomeric endovenous pump operating at 5 ml.h-1 with 16,000 mg of metamizol, 500 mg of tramadol and 16 mg of ondansetron in a 275 ml reservoir was used. At home, the Home Care Unit checked the perfusion system and the endovenous access, detected side effects and events attributable to the system and withdrew the system prematurely during the first 48 hours of postoperative. Results: Just 1 out of 61 patients of the study (1.63%) had severe pain during the first day of postoperative, compared to 81.96% of patients that did not have pain at day 1, 95% at day 2 and 98.35% at day 3. The 9,83% of patients required rescue therapy with tramadol and 20 patients reported side effects attributable to analgesics. There were two cases of early withdrawal of the infusion system because of intolerance to tramadol. A 91.8% of patients reported a high degree of satisfaction with the infusion system and the procedure. Conclusion: Our study has shown the feasibility and safety of the use of endovenous elastomeric infusion pumps as a method of postoperative analgesia that allow to manage cases of moderate or severe pain after outpatient surgical procedures. However, further studies are required to compare this technique with conventional analgesic techniques, as well as with different infusion regimes.
展开▼
