• L T Wong, L H Koh, K Kaur, and S K Boey.
• Department of Anaesthesia & Surgical Intensive Care, Singapore General Hospital, Singapore.
• Singap Med J. 1997 May 1; 38 (5): 209-13.

AbstractThe first anaesthesia-based acute pain service in Singapore is described. The benefits, risks and resource implications of such a service during its first two years are reviewed. One thousand two hundred and sixty-eight (1,268) post-operative patients were treated with either patient-controlled analgesia (310 patients) or epidural opioid analgesia (958 patients). Retrospective analysis of the data revealed good patient satisfaction with a low incidence of potentially life threatening side-effects: more than 79% of patients reported satisfaction with pain control while only 0.2% of patients receiving epidural opioid analgesia experienced clinically significant respiratory depression. There were no reports of respiratory depression in the patient-controlled analgesia group. The authors conclude that the provision of an acute pain service in the local context was safe and resulted in excellent post-operative patient satisfaction.

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