Everything started back in 2016 at a course on the latest developments in the field of postoperative pain management. It was there that two hospital pharmacists, Nuria and Maria, the former specializing in acute pain management and the other in chronic pain management, crossed paths and exchanged ideas about the need to establish a workgroup specializing in Pain Management.
Sometime later, Miguel Angel Calleja, SEFH president at the time, took up the idea and decided to add a new workgroup dedicated to pain management to SEFH’S existing workgroup family.
The next step was to make sure that the idea had the support of other SEFH members With that goal in mind, Marta and Maria distributed among the participants in SEFH’s 2017 Annual Congress a 10-item survey aimed at both finding out their colleagues’ opinion about setting up a pain management workgroup and gaining an understanding of the situation of pain management in Spanish hospital pharmacy departments (survey)
A total of 136 farmacéuticos, took the survey, whose results clearly indicated that the creation of the workgroup was a more than welcome initiative. An overwhelming majority of respondents thought that further training in pain management was essential for hospital pharmacists!
SEFH’s Pain Management Workgroup was officially established in June 2018. The workgroup’s main goal is to position pain as a key element in hospital pharmacy practice so as to provide patients with higher quality care and involve hospital pharmacists more directly in pain management. At the outset, the workgroup boasted a 10-strong steering committee and no less than 35 active members!