Patient Controlled Oral Analgesia (PCOA) for Postoperative Pain Management After Total Knee Replacement-A Pilot Study

Patient Centered Care (PCC) is "an approach that consciously adopts the patient's perspective...about what matters" (Gerteis, Edgeman, Levitan, Walker, Stokes, Cleary, Delbanco, 1993). Experiencing pain is the most common concern of patients before surgery - even ahead of whether the surgery would improve their condition (Apfelbaum, 2003). Current standard of practice for post-operative pain management in most acute care hospitals today is intravenous patient controlled analgesia (IV PCA). However, despite the fact that patients prefer IV PCA because it affords them greater control and provides them with better pain relief (Ballantyne, Carr, deFerranti, Suarez, Lau, Chalmers, Angelillo, Mosteller, 1998 ; Rawal, 2001), hospitals routinely take control of pain medications away from patients once they are switched to pain tablets. Patients must then wait, in pain, for their nurse to bring them pain tablets.

Patient controlled oral analgesia (PCOA) has been utilitzed in several centers in the US and Germany. Preliminary evidence from the literature seems to indicate that the benefits of PCOA are similar to IV PCA including increased patient satisfaction and better pain control (Striebel, Romer, Kopf, Schwagmeier ,1996; Striebel, Scheitza, Philippi, Behrens, Toussaint, 1998). At the Toronto Western Hospital, University Health Network, we have successfully implemented a PCOA program on two surgical units (Orthopedics/Rheumatology and Spinal). The purpose of this study is to compare usual nurse administered oral analgesia to PCOA with respect to pain, patient satisfaction, and passive range of knee motion in postoperative total knee replacement patients.