Transforming pain services in the post-COVID era

摘要

Back in May, the Faculty of Pain Medicine of the Royal College of Anaesthetists highlighted specific impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on pain management; up to 1 in 4 specialist pain clinicians reported that services had been fully suspended and 78% of those who maintained services were relying on remote consultations.' Three months later, NHS England set the priority for recovery -accelerating the return to near-normal levels of non-COVID-19 health services.2 Thinking about the many people whose non-urgent elective surgeries have been postponed during the emergency pandemic response - such as the 250,000 people having hip or knee replacements annually -their ability to access local pain management services during an extended wait for surgery is crucial. As the NHS implements its return to service ambitions for patients needing both urgent and elective care, today's challenge is to capture learnings from the initial pandemic response while managing the threat of a second wave.