Opioid Sparing at the UIC
The opioid epidemic remains a public health, social and economic crisis in the US affecting over 2 million people nationwide. Chronic opioid misuse often begins with opioid use postoperatively. Therefore the perioperative period presents a crucial opportunity to influence the opioid epidemic.
To address this issue our department participated in a multidisciplinary effort at our institution, spearheaded by the Head of the Department of Surgery, Dr. Benedetti, that led to the development of Opioid Avoidance Protocols for Post-Operative Analgesia. (The SOAP project).
We created evidence based guidelines and expanded safer post -operative pain management with non -opioid based multimodal pharmacological analgesic approaches for all surgeries.
Since the implementation of these protocols in May 2019 opioids, are now scarcely used for post-operative pain control at our institution, and our patients are being successfully treated by receiving quality analgesic interventions.