NapoliToday
For the first time, Cardarelli has activated structured paths for pain therapy within the wards, implementing the organizational path which, following the ministerial guidelines, will lead it to be a “pain-free hospital” on a par with other large Italian hospitals . This is a new organizational procedure intended for all hospital departments which allows for the sharing of specific analgesia practices and procedures, making use of the expertise of the hospital’s Emergency Department’s Resuscitation Department. Parallel to this path, the hospital has activated a pain therapy clinic which, already in this first phase of activity, guarantees over 200 visits a month. The structure can count on two anesthesiologists in charge of the service, dedicated nursing staff and twenty doctors from the Resuscitation Department of the Emergency Department. The pain treatment clinic will follow both patients suffering from chronic pain discharged from hospital and those who access from outside by booking the CUP on prescription from the family doctor. Says Antonio d’Amore, General Director of AORN Cardarelli “We felt it was essential to start an organizational process that allows uniform treatment of pain within the various departments to guarantee all patients the same standards of care. The integration of this activity with the setting up of a clinic dedicated to the treatment of pain will allow us to guarantee therapeutic continuity for our patients and ensure new opportunities for assistance to those who will come from outside
.” Currently, the Cardarelli Pain Therapy team, in addition to using specific pharmacological protocols, uses micro-invasive treatments for chronic pain such as percutaneous and transdermal electrical stimulation. Maria Giovanna De Cristofaro, Director of the UOC Resuscitation DEA says: “The “Hospital without pain” path allows us to standardize the analgesic treatment, homologating the therapies and procedures. First of all, we have expanded the section of the computerized medical record dedicated to pain, integrating it with all the measurement scales and with the clinical information necessary for the antalgic treatment, regardless of the specific pathology. Obviously the pain in Cardarelli is already treated in all departments especially in cancer patients, traumatized, and in those who are in the post-operative phase. What we are doing now is paying maximum attention to detecting the first painful symptoms, classifying them in their characteristics, giving them the right therapy – be it pharmacological or minimally invasive – and we hope, sharing it with all the specialist colleagues involved, to arrive quickly to a specific company diagnostic-therapeutic protocol.”