Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

Predicting opioid consumption after surgical discharge: a multinational derivation and validation study using a foundation model

Opioids are frequently overprescribed after surgery. We applied a tabular foundation model to predict the risk of post-discharge opioid consumption. The model was trained and internally validated on an 80:20 training/test split of the ‘Opioid PrEscRiptions and usage After Surgery’ (ACTRN12621001451897p) study cohort, including adult patients undergoing general, orthopaedic, gynaecological and urological operations (n = 4267), with external validation in a distinct cohort of patients discharged after general surgical procedures (n = 826). The area under the receiver operator curve was 0.84 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.81–0.88) at internal testing and 0.77 (95% CI 0.74–0.80) at external validation. Brier scores were 0.13 (95% CI 0.12–0.14) and 0.19 (95% CI 0.17–0.2). Patients with a <50% predicted risk of opioid consumption consumed a median of 0 oral morphine equivalents in the first week after surgery. Applying this model would reduce opioid prescriptions by 4.5% globally, and counterfactual modelling suggests without increasing time in severe pain (−4.3%, 95% CI −17.7 to 8.6)