First Year Residents' Knowledge and Practice about Postoperative Pain Management

Abstract

Background and objective: The first year residents play an important role in postsurgical pain control. Assessing their knowledge and their practice is a key of success to improve their learning and patient service. So we conducted this study to assess the first year residents’ knowledge and practice about postoperative pain treatment.

Methods: A questionnaire was sent to all 45 first year residents from 5 surgical related departments.  The questionnaire had 35 questions, 15 questions were constructed for knowledge assessment and 20 questions for practice behavior. Data were analyzed by descriptive statistics.

Results: The response was 97.78%. The mean knowledge was 10.23 + 2.02 or 68.2 percent from a total of 15 scores. The highest score was 14 and the lowest was 6. Their regular practice behaviors were about pain assessment (100%) and treatment of opioids side effect (66.36%). The areas that should encourage more practices were local infiltration at surgical field (43.19%) and using NSAIDs in combined with opioids (31.82%). Their knowledge that needed to be improved was about pharmacology of opioids and its common side effects such as nausea and vomiting.

Conclusion: The level of first year residents’ knowledge about postoperative pain management is an average that needed to be improved as well as some practice behaviors.