We are the pain committee at The University Teaching Hospital of Butare in Rwanda, our objective is to educate on Pain Management and Develop education tools to healthcare providers, patients and families in our country as well as in the region. We started this program almost 3 years ago after realising that there is a big knowledge gap among healthcare providers and we found that this kind of knowledge translation might be a big and good tool to educate and transmit knowledge and skills to healthcare
professionals as well as patients and their accompanying families.
What is done so far?
Creating a pain committee, training the hospital staff up to 320 multidisciplinary staff, providing educational tools including pain assessment tools and pocket cards as well as posters on the walls in the hospital.
Developing pain guidelines, policy and procedures, postoperative multimodal pain management protocols, pain documentation tools, quality improvement project with audit tools for sustainability and creating quality improvement team that will deal with auditing and data entry. All these documents were analysed by different hospital committees to be approved and then were implemented after their approval. These documents were also creating following the hospital accreditation standards.
We have put emphasis on acute pain management to maximise it with the plan later to continue to chronic pain management. Already we have started the pain clinic as it was planned before.
