MountainView Hospital - February 21, 2020

MountainView Hospital’s Acute Pain Service (APS) is a group of anesthesiologists that are specially trained to perform nerve blocks and optimize medications in order to help patients undergo surgery as comfortably as possible.

APS’s goal is to make surgery and recovery an easy experience for patients. To achieve this goal, APS has implemented a modern approach to post-surgical pain control that has been shown to speed up recovery and reduce reliance on narcotic pain medicine.

In the long-term, APS aims to reduce patient reliance on addictive and less-effective methods of pain control such as narcotics, improve patient pain control during and after surgery and increase patient satisfaction.

MountainView’s pain management approach sets it apart from other hospitals.

“Without a dedicated pain service such as APS, patients are relegated to antiquated methods of pain control which typically means high-dose narcotics and all their associated side-effects such as nausea, constipation, moodiness, and grogginess,” says anesthesiologist Paul Q. Reynolds, MD.

“At MountainView, we rely on 21st-century regional techniques to target pain more effectively and in different ways, thereby reducing the narcotic need.”

APS is primarily a surgery service, meaning it is mainly for patients who are having or just had surgery. The anesthesia service is available to every surgeon that operates at MountainView, and many of them request it whenever appropriate.

“Certain surgeries are more amenable to our services than others, but we are always happy to evaluate and discuss whether you could benefit from our services,” Reynolds says.

Since the establishment of APS in fall 2019, opioid administration to patients during surgery has decreased.

Reynolds says he has seen patients be overwhelmingly excited that MountainView Hospital is taking steps toward better and more efficient pain control.

Patients who are having surgery at MountainView and are interested in having APS evaluate and direct their pain control should mention it to the surgeon who will then contact the service.