Acute Pain Service

Our acute pain service provides perioperative pain management at the University of Utah Hospital, Huntsman Cancer Institute, Orthopaedic Hospital, and Veterans Affairs Medical Center. This includes a variety of multi-modal and preventive analgesia options including complex opioid management, adjunct therapies, nerve blockade/catheters, epidural analgesia, and the like. Our 14 acute pain anesthesiologists perform several thousand regional nerve blocks annually as well as assist our four advanced practice nurses in providing pain management consultation services to both surgical and non-surgical hospitalized patients. The team makes daily bedside rounds and a team member is available 24/7 to assist with pain management issues.

We also train 12 anesthesia residents and one to two fellows a year in state of the art pain management techniques including ultrasound guidance for nerve blockade. We promote ongoing research into acute pain management and have publications in high quality journals as well as a website that provides free tutorials on ultrasound nerve block techniques.