911 Time to Analgesia

Aim According to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine guidelines 2021, patients in pain should receive analgesia within 15 minutes of arrival. It is known that acute surgical patients in pain often have to wait a considerable amount of time to receive analgesia when presenting to the Emergency department (ED). Hence, we wanted to see if starting a Surgical Assessment Unit(SAU) would help improve the time to analgesia for such patients. Method A two-cycle audit was conducted, and data was collected retrospectively. Cycle 1 focused on the time to analgesia for acute surgical patients presenting to ED while cycle 2 was for those presenting to SAU. Data was compared on two factors which were: the time between prescription and administration and the overall time taken to receive the first dose of analgesia. Results In cycle 1, which was time to analgesia for patients presenting to ED, a total of 253 patients were included. It was noted that the average time period to receive analgesia after entering the hospital was 210 minutes and the average time taken between prescription and administration of analgesia was 51 mins. Cycle 2 was conducted after the start of SAU and a total of 100 patients were included. In this case, the average time to receive analgesia after arrival was 113 minutes while the average time taken between prescription and administration was 18 minutes. Conclusions While not yet up to the Royal College recommendations, having an SAU definitely benefits acute surgical patients in terms of providing earlier analgesia.