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Note: This is Part 3 of The Hospitalist’s series on pain and hospital medicine. Part 1 appeared on p. 45 of the April issue, and Part 2 appeared on p. 33 of the June issue.
Hospitalists face demands for pain care every day. Usually, the general pain principles described in the first two articles in this series and the use of a few opioid analgesics with which the hospitalist has become familiar can supply relief.
But what about the more difficult cases in which psychosocial influences or a history of substance abuse complicates the patient’s pain? Perhaps it is a chronic pain case that has never been adequately addressed, or the patient keeps turning up in the emergency department (ED) complaining of out-of-control pain. Other examples of difficult-to-manage pain include complex regional pain syndrome, post-herpetic neuralgia, other neuropathic pains, sickle cell anemia, and patients at high risk of opioid toxicity.
These cases are like a leaky bucket for the hospital—costly, frustrating, unsatisfying to the patient, and prone to bad outcomes, says Jerry Wesch, PhD, director of the pain service for the Alexian Brothers Health System in greater Chicago. “These are the patients who tend to bedevil everybody in the hospital,” he says.
Dealing with such patients is a demanding task.
“You don’t have chronic pain without a psycho-social-spiritual overlay,” adds Scott Fishman, MD, chief of the Division of Pain Medicine at University of California-Davis in Sacramento. “Their emotional lives are deteriorating. They can’t sleep, they’re depressed, and their physical functioning is also deteriorating. There are all kinds of situations that demand use of a full spectrum of bio-psycho-social interventions in addition to opioid analgesics.”
These complex, unresolved cases are likely to have emotional, social, or spiritual manifestations. But what does that mean to a busy hospitalist with a short window of opportunity to address patients’ pain before pointing them toward discharge? A psychologist, social worker, or chaplain may have something to contribute to pain management. Meanwhile, the rest of the caseload is clamoring for the hospitalist’s attention.
Make Pain Management Multidisciplinary
A dizzying array of pain modalities can be brought to bear on complex pain cases. These range from opioid analgesics to a variety of adjuvant non-opioid medications to interventional techniques involving surgery, spinal injections, nerve blocks, nerve stimulation, and nerve destruction techniques.
There are also complementary methodologies (e.g., acupuncture) that have been shown to reduce the volume of narcotics needed for pain control, even though how they work is not well understood.
But how many hospitalists call on acupuncturists, hypnotists, or teachers of guided-imagery meditation for their patients? Many of these techniques are more appropriately initiated in the outpatient setting, but the hospitalist still has a responsibility to make sure “frequent fliers” with complex pain complaints get connected post-discharge to a pain service that can offer long-term relief. The challenge is applying the acute treatment models of the hospital to chronic pain syndromes that are not optimally addressed in crisis mode.
Jonathan Weston, MD, a hospitalist at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colo., says these difficult, chronic pain cases are the bane of the hospitalist’s working life. These patients show up at night in the ED saying, “ ‘I’m in so much pain, please don’t send me home,’ ” he says. “The emergency physician puts them on an IV drip and their pain is relieved for the moment, but only one facet of that pain has been addressed.”
The emergency physician—also under caseload pressure— decides the easiest disposition is to admit the patient and dump the problem on the hospitalist. “They’re out of their pain medications at home, and when you call the attending you are told that they are drug seekers,” Dr. Weston relates. “These patients take a lot of energy. They can be manipulative. We can’t do right for them. It’s not satisfying. We don’t want to round on them. The way we hospitalists manage these patients sometimes reflects not only the patient’s personality, but our personality as well.”
Hospitalists don’t just treat these patients’ pain, they also address their suffering, he says.
High-quality pain management is multidisciplinary, Dr. Weston notes, because pain is multifactorial. The hospitalist occupies an important coordinating position and is charged with responsibility for the whole person during that patient’s brief hospital stay. But there are limits to what the hospitalist can accomplish. A palliative care team or an acute pain service can make important contributions to hospitalized patients’ pain. So can social workers, psychologists, pharmacists, and chaplains. But it is the hospitalist’s responsibility to coordinate these pieces of the pain puzzle for patients on service.
In many hospitals, the palliative care service has been set up to consult on pain, suffering, and clarification of treatment goals for patients nearing the end of life. These services vary from institution to institution in terms of whether they prefer to focus on end-of-life issues or are comfortable fielding other kinds of chronic pain questions. Acute pain services equally vary in terms of whether their focus is primarily on surgical pain “interventions” or on a multidisciplinary approach to pain management.
Ideally, Dr. Weston says, a major hospital would have both services available as resources to the hospitalist. Or, if there is only one of them, it should have a broad approach to pain management. Otherwise, it is up to the hospitalist to pull together a virtual pain team to provide a multidisciplinary response to complex pain.
“I am also board certified in hospice and palliative medicine,” Dr. Weston says. “I can use my medical knowledge to try to get the patient comfortable on oral meds so that they can go home. And I can personally make an appointment for them within 48 hours of discharge with their attending physician or a pain specialist. But for too many patients, this connection never happens.”
“Pain management in general is a hard thing to deal with,” adds Lauren Fraser, MD, regional chief of the department of hospital medicine for Kaiser Permanente Colorado in Denver. “It’s frustrating because you want to do the right thing,” she says. “We need first of all to rule out anything we can fix that might be causing the pain. Then we’re dealing with the patient’s quality of life and the disabling effects of pain. Each patient and family has a different need, and when you meet with them one-on-one you’re dealing with all of it.”
Dr. Fraser doesn’t have access to an acute pain service in her current setting, “although we have interventional folks to put in the PCAs and epidurals. We generally are able to get the services we need, although there would be an advantage to having an identified multidisciplinary pain service to provide the coordination.”
A “Pain Hospitalist”
Jerry Wesch, director of the pain program at Alexian Brothers Hospital Network in Arlington Heights, Ill., recently posted a job listing on the Internet seeking a pain management physician. He is looking for a doctor with an interest in comprehensive, interdisciplinary team management of chronic pain who is “able to function as a pain hospitalist.”
Although the details of this new position are still being finalized and a pain hospitalist would function with a different focus than a generalist hospitalist, Wesch suggests the role has important analogies with what hospitalists like Dr. Weston face in coordinating a virtual team of multidisciplinary pain resources.
Wesch is building an inpatient pain service comprising the pain physician, two nurse practitioners, and a part-time psychologist with full-time presence in two Alexian Brothers acute hospitals. This team would work closely with hospitalists, the palliative care service, and ancillary services such as physical therapy and chaplains.
“This should make us ideal collaborators with the hospitalists, who can just walk down the hall and initiate a pain consult,” he explains. “We’re all working toward the same goal, which is to improve efficiency, medical management, quality of care, and patient satisfaction. A good hospitalist is also my best ally in building a multidisciplinary pain service.”
In other settings, however, it will be the hospitalist’s responsibility to build the relationships that bring these pain resources together.
Deb Gordon, RN, MS, FAAN, senior clinical nurse specialist at the University of Wisconsin Medical Center in Madison, also sees herself functioning like a hospitalist in addressing pain issues. “I manage a clinical pain consultation service. I see patients every day,” she says. “I’m also in staff development, helping professionals in the hospital learn to manage pain better, and using quality improvement techniques to take what we know about pain management to support people like hospitalists at the bedside.”
Since 1990, an interdisciplinary quality improvement pain management group has been meeting at the UW medical center to improve the institution’s response to pain patients. Gordon believes pain is a natural target for hospital quality-improvement activities because it touches on the domains of quality identified by groups such as the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass.
Limits in the Hospital Setting
Even with a vast array of pain modalities, hospitalists face inherent limitations in addressing pain challenges within the hospital, starting with caseload pressures and short lengths of stay. Many of the approaches that might offer long-term solutions to the patient’s chronic pain syndrome belong in the outpatient setting, adds John Massey, MD, president and medical director of Nebraska Pain Consultants in Lincoln.
Dr. Massey sees chronic pain cases that have been refractory to treatment, both at his clinic and as a consultant in the hospital. Inevitably there is a psychological overlay to these cases, he says. That doesn’t mean the patient’s pain isn’t real, but if high doses of analgesics have failed to bring the pain under control, then a different approach is needed—one that includes behavioral techniques and involves the patient not as a passive recipient of treatment, but an active participant in his or her own pain management and coping strategies.
“There are ways to treat, for example, back pain that require finding a specific nerve in the spine responsible for the pain,” says Dr. Massey. “If I can locate that nerve, there are things that I can do, like radio frequency neuro-ablation. But this requires three separate visits to the pain clinic to make an accurate diagnosis. I’m often consulted by hospitalists and there are things I can do to put a finger in the dike. But I try to add another perspective to my discussion with the hospitalist, pointing out that many of the best pain management modalities are done on an outpatient basis.”
What can be achieved in the hospital often is more of a Band-Aid, sometimes even a step backward in terms of the lifestyle changes necessary to get patients out of their passive response to their chronic pain, Dr. Massey says.
The hospitalist’s job is to see what can be done to make patients more comfortable and then send them home with a referral to the pain service, if that is indicated. “I’m happy to help with an intervention in the hospital but, ultimately, we’d like the patient to be less dependent on opioids to treat their pain,” says Dr. Massey. “I know that nothing I can do will really change the situation until I get them out of the hospital and can initiate physical therapy and behavioral interventions.”
There are no shortcuts to permanent pain relief, which can be long, slow, hard work using evidence-based medicine, Dr. Massey says. But it also involves a frank discussion with the patient, which may be hard in the hospital.
“One of the questions we ask patients is: How many times have you visited the emergency room for pain?” says Dr. Massey. “If the answer is more than four in a year, there are likely to be psychological co-morbidities. The challenge for the hospitalist is, ‘How can I arrest this acute pain episode, and then what can I contribute to helping the patient find the help he or she needs to prevent the next episode?’ That means trying to establish rapport and pointing the person to appropriate follow-up pain resources. If you go too hard too fast, the patient may reject what you’re offering. But if you do nothing, you’re facilitating a continued passive approach that doesn’t lead to meaningful solutions.”
Dr. Massey recently saw a woman who had been in the ED 48 times in the previous year for pain that had a major behavioral component. The hospital hired him after the 48th visit to find a different approach to controlling the patient’s pain.
Make Pain a Priority
“My hospitalist group meets regularly to discuss difficult topics, and pain often comes up,” says Stephen Bekanich, MD, hospitalist and palliative care physician at the University of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City. “The more you can focus on pain, the more time you spend making it a priority, you are sending a message: This is important to me. You communicate to nurses and other staff that you take pain seriously.”
Dr. Fishman concurs. “Ultimately, it is an issue of priorities and how to prioritize what gets done in the hospital,” he says. “Why would a health professional ever categorize pain relief as a lower priority? We have wandered far from our compassionate mission as doctors when that happens.
“In the real world, when there is no one else to do it, and no pain clinics available, the responsibility for pain management falls on the provider at the front lines, often the emergency physician and the hospitalist. Hospitalists are becoming de facto pain specialists for patients with chronic and terminal conditions. These patients are looking for support, comfort, and redirection. This can also be one of the most rewarding aspects of hospital practice. It really brings you back to the roots of medicine.” TH
Larry Beresford is a regular contributor to The Hospitalist.
Note: This is Part 3 of The Hospitalist’s series on pain and hospital medicine. Part 1 appeared on p. 45 of the April issue, and Part 2 appeared on p. 33 of the June issue.
Hospitalists face demands for pain care every day. Usually, the general pain principles described in the first two articles in this series and the use of a few opioid analgesics with which the hospitalist has become familiar can supply relief.
But what about the more difficult cases in which psychosocial influences or a history of substance abuse complicates the patient’s pain? Perhaps it is a chronic pain case that has never been adequately addressed, or the patient keeps turning up in the emergency department (ED) complaining of out-of-control pain. Other examples of difficult-to-manage pain include complex regional pain syndrome, post-herpetic neuralgia, other neuropathic pains, sickle cell anemia, and patients at high risk of opioid toxicity.
These cases are like a leaky bucket for the hospital—costly, frustrating, unsatisfying to the patient, and prone to bad outcomes, says Jerry Wesch, PhD, director of the pain service for the Alexian Brothers Health System in greater Chicago. “These are the patients who tend to bedevil everybody in the hospital,” he says.
Dealing with such patients is a demanding task.
“You don’t have chronic pain without a psycho-social-spiritual overlay,” adds Scott Fishman, MD, chief of the Division of Pain Medicine at University of California-Davis in Sacramento. “Their emotional lives are deteriorating. They can’t sleep, they’re depressed, and their physical functioning is also deteriorating. There are all kinds of situations that demand use of a full spectrum of bio-psycho-social interventions in addition to opioid analgesics.”
These complex, unresolved cases are likely to have emotional, social, or spiritual manifestations. But what does that mean to a busy hospitalist with a short window of opportunity to address patients’ pain before pointing them toward discharge? A psychologist, social worker, or chaplain may have something to contribute to pain management. Meanwhile, the rest of the caseload is clamoring for the hospitalist’s attention.
Make Pain Management Multidisciplinary
A dizzying array of pain modalities can be brought to bear on complex pain cases. These range from opioid analgesics to a variety of adjuvant non-opioid medications to interventional techniques involving surgery, spinal injections, nerve blocks, nerve stimulation, and nerve destruction techniques.
There are also complementary methodologies (e.g., acupuncture) that have been shown to reduce the volume of narcotics needed for pain control, even though how they work is not well understood.
But how many hospitalists call on acupuncturists, hypnotists, or teachers of guided-imagery meditation for their patients? Many of these techniques are more appropriately initiated in the outpatient setting, but the hospitalist still has a responsibility to make sure “frequent fliers” with complex pain complaints get connected post-discharge to a pain service that can offer long-term relief. The challenge is applying the acute treatment models of the hospital to chronic pain syndromes that are not optimally addressed in crisis mode.
Jonathan Weston, MD, a hospitalist at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colo., says these difficult, chronic pain cases are the bane of the hospitalist’s working life. These patients show up at night in the ED saying, “ ‘I’m in so much pain, please don’t send me home,’ ” he says. “The emergency physician puts them on an IV drip and their pain is relieved for the moment, but only one facet of that pain has been addressed.”
The emergency physician—also under caseload pressure— decides the easiest disposition is to admit the patient and dump the problem on the hospitalist. “They’re out of their pain medications at home, and when you call the attending you are told that they are drug seekers,” Dr. Weston relates. “These patients take a lot of energy. They can be manipulative. We can’t do right for them. It’s not satisfying. We don’t want to round on them. The way we hospitalists manage these patients sometimes reflects not only the patient’s personality, but our personality as well.”
Hospitalists don’t just treat these patients’ pain, they also address their suffering, he says.
High-quality pain management is multidisciplinary, Dr. Weston notes, because pain is multifactorial. The hospitalist occupies an important coordinating position and is charged with responsibility for the whole person during that patient’s brief hospital stay. But there are limits to what the hospitalist can accomplish. A palliative care team or an acute pain service can make important contributions to hospitalized patients’ pain. So can social workers, psychologists, pharmacists, and chaplains. But it is the hospitalist’s responsibility to coordinate these pieces of the pain puzzle for patients on service.
In many hospitals, the palliative care service has been set up to consult on pain, suffering, and clarification of treatment goals for patients nearing the end of life. These services vary from institution to institution in terms of whether they prefer to focus on end-of-life issues or are comfortable fielding other kinds of chronic pain questions. Acute pain services equally vary in terms of whether their focus is primarily on surgical pain “interventions” or on a multidisciplinary approach to pain management.
Ideally, Dr. Weston says, a major hospital would have both services available as resources to the hospitalist. Or, if there is only one of them, it should have a broad approach to pain management. Otherwise, it is up to the hospitalist to pull together a virtual pain team to provide a multidisciplinary response to complex pain.
“I am also board certified in hospice and palliative medicine,” Dr. Weston says. “I can use my medical knowledge to try to get the patient comfortable on oral meds so that they can go home. And I can personally make an appointment for them within 48 hours of discharge with their attending physician or a pain specialist. But for too many patients, this connection never happens.”
“Pain management in general is a hard thing to deal with,” adds Lauren Fraser, MD, regional chief of the department of hospital medicine for Kaiser Permanente Colorado in Denver. “It’s frustrating because you want to do the right thing,” she says. “We need first of all to rule out anything we can fix that might be causing the pain. Then we’re dealing with the patient’s quality of life and the disabling effects of pain. Each patient and family has a different need, and when you meet with them one-on-one you’re dealing with all of it.”
Dr. Fraser doesn’t have access to an acute pain service in her current setting, “although we have interventional folks to put in the PCAs and epidurals. We generally are able to get the services we need, although there would be an advantage to having an identified multidisciplinary pain service to provide the coordination.”
A “Pain Hospitalist”
Jerry Wesch, director of the pain program at Alexian Brothers Hospital Network in Arlington Heights, Ill., recently posted a job listing on the Internet seeking a pain management physician. He is looking for a doctor with an interest in comprehensive, interdisciplinary team management of chronic pain who is “able to function as a pain hospitalist.”
Although the details of this new position are still being finalized and a pain hospitalist would function with a different focus than a generalist hospitalist, Wesch suggests the role has important analogies with what hospitalists like Dr. Weston face in coordinating a virtual team of multidisciplinary pain resources.
Wesch is building an inpatient pain service comprising the pain physician, two nurse practitioners, and a part-time psychologist with full-time presence in two Alexian Brothers acute hospitals. This team would work closely with hospitalists, the palliative care service, and ancillary services such as physical therapy and chaplains.
“This should make us ideal collaborators with the hospitalists, who can just walk down the hall and initiate a pain consult,” he explains. “We’re all working toward the same goal, which is to improve efficiency, medical management, quality of care, and patient satisfaction. A good hospitalist is also my best ally in building a multidisciplinary pain service.”
In other settings, however, it will be the hospitalist’s responsibility to build the relationships that bring these pain resources together.
Deb Gordon, RN, MS, FAAN, senior clinical nurse specialist at the University of Wisconsin Medical Center in Madison, also sees herself functioning like a hospitalist in addressing pain issues. “I manage a clinical pain consultation service. I see patients every day,” she says. “I’m also in staff development, helping professionals in the hospital learn to manage pain better, and using quality improvement techniques to take what we know about pain management to support people like hospitalists at the bedside.”
Since 1990, an interdisciplinary quality improvement pain management group has been meeting at the UW medical center to improve the institution’s response to pain patients. Gordon believes pain is a natural target for hospital quality-improvement activities because it touches on the domains of quality identified by groups such as the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass.
Limits in the Hospital Setting
Even with a vast array of pain modalities, hospitalists face inherent limitations in addressing pain challenges within the hospital, starting with caseload pressures and short lengths of stay. Many of the approaches that might offer long-term solutions to the patient’s chronic pain syndrome belong in the outpatient setting, adds John Massey, MD, president and medical director of Nebraska Pain Consultants in Lincoln.
Dr. Massey sees chronic pain cases that have been refractory to treatment, both at his clinic and as a consultant in the hospital. Inevitably there is a psychological overlay to these cases, he says. That doesn’t mean the patient’s pain isn’t real, but if high doses of analgesics have failed to bring the pain under control, then a different approach is needed—one that includes behavioral techniques and involves the patient not as a passive recipient of treatment, but an active participant in his or her own pain management and coping strategies.
“There are ways to treat, for example, back pain that require finding a specific nerve in the spine responsible for the pain,” says Dr. Massey. “If I can locate that nerve, there are things that I can do, like radio frequency neuro-ablation. But this requires three separate visits to the pain clinic to make an accurate diagnosis. I’m often consulted by hospitalists and there are things I can do to put a finger in the dike. But I try to add another perspective to my discussion with the hospitalist, pointing out that many of the best pain management modalities are done on an outpatient basis.”
What can be achieved in the hospital often is more of a Band-Aid, sometimes even a step backward in terms of the lifestyle changes necessary to get patients out of their passive response to their chronic pain, Dr. Massey says.
The hospitalist’s job is to see what can be done to make patients more comfortable and then send them home with a referral to the pain service, if that is indicated. “I’m happy to help with an intervention in the hospital but, ultimately, we’d like the patient to be less dependent on opioids to treat their pain,” says Dr. Massey. “I know that nothing I can do will really change the situation until I get them out of the hospital and can initiate physical therapy and behavioral interventions.”
There are no shortcuts to permanent pain relief, which can be long, slow, hard work using evidence-based medicine, Dr. Massey says. But it also involves a frank discussion with the patient, which may be hard in the hospital.
“One of the questions we ask patients is: How many times have you visited the emergency room for pain?” says Dr. Massey. “If the answer is more than four in a year, there are likely to be psychological co-morbidities. The challenge for the hospitalist is, ‘How can I arrest this acute pain episode, and then what can I contribute to helping the patient find the help he or she needs to prevent the next episode?’ That means trying to establish rapport and pointing the person to appropriate follow-up pain resources. If you go too hard too fast, the patient may reject what you’re offering. But if you do nothing, you’re facilitating a continued passive approach that doesn’t lead to meaningful solutions.”
Dr. Massey recently saw a woman who had been in the ED 48 times in the previous year for pain that had a major behavioral component. The hospital hired him after the 48th visit to find a different approach to controlling the patient’s pain.
Make Pain a Priority
“My hospitalist group meets regularly to discuss difficult topics, and pain often comes up,” says Stephen Bekanich, MD, hospitalist and palliative care physician at the University of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City. “The more you can focus on pain, the more time you spend making it a priority, you are sending a message: This is important to me. You communicate to nurses and other staff that you take pain seriously.”
Dr. Fishman concurs. “Ultimately, it is an issue of priorities and how to prioritize what gets done in the hospital,” he says. “Why would a health professional ever categorize pain relief as a lower priority? We have wandered far from our compassionate mission as doctors when that happens.
“In the real world, when there is no one else to do it, and no pain clinics available, the responsibility for pain management falls on the provider at the front lines, often the emergency physician and the hospitalist. Hospitalists are becoming de facto pain specialists for patients with chronic and terminal conditions. These patients are looking for support, comfort, and redirection. This can also be one of the most rewarding aspects of hospital practice. It really brings you back to the roots of medicine.” TH
Larry Beresford is a regular contributor to The Hospitalist.
Note: This is Part 3 of The Hospitalist’s series on pain and hospital medicine. Part 1 appeared on p. 45 of the April issue, and Part 2 appeared on p. 33 of the June issue.
Hospitalists face demands for pain care every day. Usually, the general pain principles described in the first two articles in this series and the use of a few opioid analgesics with which the hospitalist has become familiar can supply relief.
But what about the more difficult cases in which psychosocial influences or a history of substance abuse complicates the patient’s pain? Perhaps it is a chronic pain case that has never been adequately addressed, or the patient keeps turning up in the emergency department (ED) complaining of out-of-control pain. Other examples of difficult-to-manage pain include complex regional pain syndrome, post-herpetic neuralgia, other neuropathic pains, sickle cell anemia, and patients at high risk of opioid toxicity.
These cases are like a leaky bucket for the hospital—costly, frustrating, unsatisfying to the patient, and prone to bad outcomes, says Jerry Wesch, PhD, director of the pain service for the Alexian Brothers Health System in greater Chicago. “These are the patients who tend to bedevil everybody in the hospital,” he says.
Dealing with such patients is a demanding task.
“You don’t have chronic pain without a psycho-social-spiritual overlay,” adds Scott Fishman, MD, chief of the Division of Pain Medicine at University of California-Davis in Sacramento. “Their emotional lives are deteriorating. They can’t sleep, they’re depressed, and their physical functioning is also deteriorating. There are all kinds of situations that demand use of a full spectrum of bio-psycho-social interventions in addition to opioid analgesics.”
These complex, unresolved cases are likely to have emotional, social, or spiritual manifestations. But what does that mean to a busy hospitalist with a short window of opportunity to address patients’ pain before pointing them toward discharge? A psychologist, social worker, or chaplain may have something to contribute to pain management. Meanwhile, the rest of the caseload is clamoring for the hospitalist’s attention.
Make Pain Management Multidisciplinary
A dizzying array of pain modalities can be brought to bear on complex pain cases. These range from opioid analgesics to a variety of adjuvant non-opioid medications to interventional techniques involving surgery, spinal injections, nerve blocks, nerve stimulation, and nerve destruction techniques.
There are also complementary methodologies (e.g., acupuncture) that have been shown to reduce the volume of narcotics needed for pain control, even though how they work is not well understood.
But how many hospitalists call on acupuncturists, hypnotists, or teachers of guided-imagery meditation for their patients? Many of these techniques are more appropriately initiated in the outpatient setting, but the hospitalist still has a responsibility to make sure “frequent fliers” with complex pain complaints get connected post-discharge to a pain service that can offer long-term relief. The challenge is applying the acute treatment models of the hospital to chronic pain syndromes that are not optimally addressed in crisis mode.
Jonathan Weston, MD, a hospitalist at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colo., says these difficult, chronic pain cases are the bane of the hospitalist’s working life. These patients show up at night in the ED saying, “ ‘I’m in so much pain, please don’t send me home,’ ” he says. “The emergency physician puts them on an IV drip and their pain is relieved for the moment, but only one facet of that pain has been addressed.”
The emergency physician—also under caseload pressure— decides the easiest disposition is to admit the patient and dump the problem on the hospitalist. “They’re out of their pain medications at home, and when you call the attending you are told that they are drug seekers,” Dr. Weston relates. “These patients take a lot of energy. They can be manipulative. We can’t do right for them. It’s not satisfying. We don’t want to round on them. The way we hospitalists manage these patients sometimes reflects not only the patient’s personality, but our personality as well.”
Hospitalists don’t just treat these patients’ pain, they also address their suffering, he says.
High-quality pain management is multidisciplinary, Dr. Weston notes, because pain is multifactorial. The hospitalist occupies an important coordinating position and is charged with responsibility for the whole person during that patient’s brief hospital stay. But there are limits to what the hospitalist can accomplish. A palliative care team or an acute pain service can make important contributions to hospitalized patients’ pain. So can social workers, psychologists, pharmacists, and chaplains. But it is the hospitalist’s responsibility to coordinate these pieces of the pain puzzle for patients on service.
In many hospitals, the palliative care service has been set up to consult on pain, suffering, and clarification of treatment goals for patients nearing the end of life. These services vary from institution to institution in terms of whether they prefer to focus on end-of-life issues or are comfortable fielding other kinds of chronic pain questions. Acute pain services equally vary in terms of whether their focus is primarily on surgical pain “interventions” or on a multidisciplinary approach to pain management.
Ideally, Dr. Weston says, a major hospital would have both services available as resources to the hospitalist. Or, if there is only one of them, it should have a broad approach to pain management. Otherwise, it is up to the hospitalist to pull together a virtual pain team to provide a multidisciplinary response to complex pain.
“I am also board certified in hospice and palliative medicine,” Dr. Weston says. “I can use my medical knowledge to try to get the patient comfortable on oral meds so that they can go home. And I can personally make an appointment for them within 48 hours of discharge with their attending physician or a pain specialist. But for too many patients, this connection never happens.”
“Pain management in general is a hard thing to deal with,” adds Lauren Fraser, MD, regional chief of the department of hospital medicine for Kaiser Permanente Colorado in Denver. “It’s frustrating because you want to do the right thing,” she says. “We need first of all to rule out anything we can fix that might be causing the pain. Then we’re dealing with the patient’s quality of life and the disabling effects of pain. Each patient and family has a different need, and when you meet with them one-on-one you’re dealing with all of it.”
Dr. Fraser doesn’t have access to an acute pain service in her current setting, “although we have interventional folks to put in the PCAs and epidurals. We generally are able to get the services we need, although there would be an advantage to having an identified multidisciplinary pain service to provide the coordination.”
A “Pain Hospitalist”
Jerry Wesch, director of the pain program at Alexian Brothers Hospital Network in Arlington Heights, Ill., recently posted a job listing on the Internet seeking a pain management physician. He is looking for a doctor with an interest in comprehensive, interdisciplinary team management of chronic pain who is “able to function as a pain hospitalist.”
Although the details of this new position are still being finalized and a pain hospitalist would function with a different focus than a generalist hospitalist, Wesch suggests the role has important analogies with what hospitalists like Dr. Weston face in coordinating a virtual team of multidisciplinary pain resources.
Wesch is building an inpatient pain service comprising the pain physician, two nurse practitioners, and a part-time psychologist with full-time presence in two Alexian Brothers acute hospitals. This team would work closely with hospitalists, the palliative care service, and ancillary services such as physical therapy and chaplains.
“This should make us ideal collaborators with the hospitalists, who can just walk down the hall and initiate a pain consult,” he explains. “We’re all working toward the same goal, which is to improve efficiency, medical management, quality of care, and patient satisfaction. A good hospitalist is also my best ally in building a multidisciplinary pain service.”
In other settings, however, it will be the hospitalist’s responsibility to build the relationships that bring these pain resources together.
Deb Gordon, RN, MS, FAAN, senior clinical nurse specialist at the University of Wisconsin Medical Center in Madison, also sees herself functioning like a hospitalist in addressing pain issues. “I manage a clinical pain consultation service. I see patients every day,” she says. “I’m also in staff development, helping professionals in the hospital learn to manage pain better, and using quality improvement techniques to take what we know about pain management to support people like hospitalists at the bedside.”
Since 1990, an interdisciplinary quality improvement pain management group has been meeting at the UW medical center to improve the institution’s response to pain patients. Gordon believes pain is a natural target for hospital quality-improvement activities because it touches on the domains of quality identified by groups such as the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass.
Limits in the Hospital Setting
Even with a vast array of pain modalities, hospitalists face inherent limitations in addressing pain challenges within the hospital, starting with caseload pressures and short lengths of stay. Many of the approaches that might offer long-term solutions to the patient’s chronic pain syndrome belong in the outpatient setting, adds John Massey, MD, president and medical director of Nebraska Pain Consultants in Lincoln.
Dr. Massey sees chronic pain cases that have been refractory to treatment, both at his clinic and as a consultant in the hospital. Inevitably there is a psychological overlay to these cases, he says. That doesn’t mean the patient’s pain isn’t real, but if high doses of analgesics have failed to bring the pain under control, then a different approach is needed—one that includes behavioral techniques and involves the patient not as a passive recipient of treatment, but an active participant in his or her own pain management and coping strategies.
“There are ways to treat, for example, back pain that require finding a specific nerve in the spine responsible for the pain,” says Dr. Massey. “If I can locate that nerve, there are things that I can do, like radio frequency neuro-ablation. But this requires three separate visits to the pain clinic to make an accurate diagnosis. I’m often consulted by hospitalists and there are things I can do to put a finger in the dike. But I try to add another perspective to my discussion with the hospitalist, pointing out that many of the best pain management modalities are done on an outpatient basis.”
What can be achieved in the hospital often is more of a Band-Aid, sometimes even a step backward in terms of the lifestyle changes necessary to get patients out of their passive response to their chronic pain, Dr. Massey says.
The hospitalist’s job is to see what can be done to make patients more comfortable and then send them home with a referral to the pain service, if that is indicated. “I’m happy to help with an intervention in the hospital but, ultimately, we’d like the patient to be less dependent on opioids to treat their pain,” says Dr. Massey. “I know that nothing I can do will really change the situation until I get them out of the hospital and can initiate physical therapy and behavioral interventions.”
There are no shortcuts to permanent pain relief, which can be long, slow, hard work using evidence-based medicine, Dr. Massey says. But it also involves a frank discussion with the patient, which may be hard in the hospital.
“One of the questions we ask patients is: How many times have you visited the emergency room for pain?” says Dr. Massey. “If the answer is more than four in a year, there are likely to be psychological co-morbidities. The challenge for the hospitalist is, ‘How can I arrest this acute pain episode, and then what can I contribute to helping the patient find the help he or she needs to prevent the next episode?’ That means trying to establish rapport and pointing the person to appropriate follow-up pain resources. If you go too hard too fast, the patient may reject what you’re offering. But if you do nothing, you’re facilitating a continued passive approach that doesn’t lead to meaningful solutions.”
Dr. Massey recently saw a woman who had been in the ED 48 times in the previous year for pain that had a major behavioral component. The hospital hired him after the 48th visit to find a different approach to controlling the patient’s pain.
Make Pain a Priority
“My hospitalist group meets regularly to discuss difficult topics, and pain often comes up,” says Stephen Bekanich, MD, hospitalist and palliative care physician at the University of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City. “The more you can focus on pain, the more time you spend making it a priority, you are sending a message: This is important to me. You communicate to nurses and other staff that you take pain seriously.”
Dr. Fishman concurs. “Ultimately, it is an issue of priorities and how to prioritize what gets done in the hospital,” he says. “Why would a health professional ever categorize pain relief as a lower priority? We have wandered far from our compassionate mission as doctors when that happens.
“In the real world, when there is no one else to do it, and no pain clinics available, the responsibility for pain management falls on the provider at the front lines, often the emergency physician and the hospitalist. Hospitalists are becoming de facto pain specialists for patients with chronic and terminal conditions. These patients are looking for support, comfort, and redirection. This can also be one of the most rewarding aspects of hospital practice. It really brings you back to the roots of medicine.” TH
Larry Beresford is a regular contributor to The Hospitalist.