BWH Launches Pain/Sedation Management Steering Committee
In order to meet the growing demands of pain management and sedation services throughout BWH’s distributed campus, Chief Medical Officer Andy Whittemore, MD, and Chief Nursing Officer and Senior Vice President of Patient Care Services Mairead Hickey, PhD, RN, launched the BWH Pain/Sedation Management Steering Committee.
Chaired by Charles Vacanti, MD, chairman of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, the steering committee includes representatives from several standing committees: Moderate Sedation, Deep Sedation in the Emergency Department, Chronic Pain Service and Post-operative Pain Service.
“This endeavor ties together several individual efforts to provide a more coordinated institutional service,” Vacanti said. “It should help the hospital address differing needs in various specialties and ensure that the same quality of care is provided to all our patients regardless of the site within our system.”
That means the provision of deep sedation in the ED is expected to be of the same quality as deep sedation in the OR, he said. Non-anesthesia physicians need to be able to recognize when medication causes a patient to go beyond deep sedation to becoming anesthetized, he added. “More and more often, we’re being called upon to provide pain relief for acute pain not related to surgery,” Vacanti said.
The leaders of the subcommittees serve on the Pain/Sedation Management Steering Committee. In addition to addressing issues specific to certain specialties or service lines, the steering committee will review and update hospital policies and work to identify academic opportunities.
“Our committee will have access to data and outcomes from a very large patient population, and I expect we will be able to help educate ourselves and our peers by utilizing this data,” Vacanti said.