Emergency Providers’ Pain Management in Patients Transferred to Intensive Care Unit for Urgent Surgical Interventions

Pain is the most common complaint for an emergency department (ED) visit, but ED pain management is poor. Reasons for poor pain management include providers’ concerns for drug-seeking behaviors and perceptions of patients’ complaints. Patients who had objective findings of long bone fractures were more likely to receive pain medication than those who did not, despite pain complaints. We hypothesized that patients who were interhospital-transferred from an ED to an intensive care unit (ICU) for urgent surgical interventions would display objective pathology for pain and thus receive adequate pain management at ED departure